EphemeralNight comments on Ephemeral correspondence - Less Wrong
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Comments (21)
Why would that be? Did evolution stop once man became conscious? Even if all the modules were there before consciousness arose that does not mean that evolution could not have given consciousness some sort of causal effects on some mind modules.
In fact, if consciousness did not have effects on our mind modules, what would it have an effect on?
Consciousness is the most recent module, and that does mean that. I'm sorry, I thought this was one point that wasn't even in dispute. It was laid out pretty clearly in the Evolution Sequence:
Evolutions Are Stupid (But Work Anyway)
The causes of the fixation of a genotype in a population are distinct from the causal structures of the resulting phenotype instantiated in actual organisms.
That doesn't sound right to me.
First, fixation is much faster. The earliest known DNA sequence with the lactase tolerance gene is 4300 years old. That's less than 200 generations ago and the gene looks to me to be quite fixed in the Northern European populations.
Second, allele B can piggyback. Allele A spreads through children of allele A carriers. If some subpopulation of A carriers also has allele B, their children will also have both A and B and these children have even more of an evolutionary advantage than children of just A (but not B) carriers.
Sorry, but no.
Yes, maybe some very similar forms of all the other modules which can still be found in our human mind design today were necessary for consciousness to arise. But this does not mean that the modules which are actually there now could not have evolved out of these modules because they work better for a conscious agent.