SilasBarta comments on Open Thread: May 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Kevin 20 May 2010 07:30PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (348)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: SilasBarta 27 May 2010 07:05:24PM *  0 points [-]

We need consciousness to remember, to learn and to do the prediction involved in controlling movement.

Controlled movement does not require consciousness, memory, learning, or prediction.

Concurred. I want to point out that Julian Jaynes presents a lot of evidence for the lack of a role for consciousness for these and many other things in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. (And yes, I know his general thesis is kind of flaky, but he handles this very narrow topic well.)

One of his examples is how people, under experimental conditions and without even knowing it, adjust muscles that can't be consciously controlled, in order to optimally contain a source of irritation. They never report any conscious recognition of the correlation between that muscle's flexing and the irritation (which was ensured to exist by the experiment, and which irritation they were aware of).