Howdy. I think his concern with the history is that he wants to reduce equivocation in debate surrounding consciousness (he is clear about this in his 'Untangling the Worldknot of Consciousness' miniseries with Gregg Henriques, though he does point to this in early AftMC episodes) by showing that so much of what we take to be natural to our cognition is largely the result of invented psychotechnology and (at least seemingly) insightful changes to our cultural cognitive grammar. It is incredibly standard for us to immediately obviate solved problems, and when something is obvious to us, we often have incredible difficulty seeing how it could have ever been otherwise.
Howdy. I think his concern with the history is that he wants to reduce equivocation in debate surrounding consciousness (he is clear about this in his 'Untangling the Worldknot of Consciousness' miniseries with Gregg Henriques, though he does point to this in early AftMC episodes) by showing that so much of what we take to be natural to our cognition is largely the result of invented psychotechnology and (at least seemingly) insightful changes to our cultural cognitive grammar. It is incredibly standard for us to immediately obviate solved problems, and when something is obvious to us, we often have incredible difficulty seeing how it could have ever been otherwise.