Consciousness against Evolution?

[Fraggle Rocker]

I am sure that squirrels & other mammals are conscious, but am not sure about reptiles & birds.

Like mammals, birds are descended from reptiles. Having worked with birds for many years, I observe all the same behaviors that are evidence of consciousness in mammals. Especially the most intelligent of the class, such as the psittacines (parrots, macaws, lories, etc.) and the corvids (crows, jays, etc.). Members of both of these clades are very quick learners. Crows have learned to fly out into a street when the traffic signal protects them from oncoming cars, to place a nut carefully in the narrow space where the cars' wheels run, then fly back to the sidewalk, wait for a car to smash the nut shell, and fly back to retrieve the meat when the next red light makes it safe to do so.

As for the psittacines, it only took our macaw two days to figure out that we'd replaced the nuts and bolts that held her cage together with left-hand threads, which were just as easy to dismantle as the original ones. And surely everyone has read about Alex, the African Grey parrot who could not quite form sentences, but could accurately form three-word phrases to describe what he saw (and tested with his tongue), such as "red metal box."

There seems to be no human mental or physical activity which could not be performed by an advanced robot who was not conscious.

This is a place of science--or at least we moderators try very hard to keep it so. Therefore, please present your evidence for this hypothesis.

 

[C C]

You could easily be a collection of 'inputs and outputs' like a 'robot' of sorts with the computing powers of our brain, and you'd go through life pretty nicely. A lot of species survive without having 'consciousness'

Yes, life could have survived by just remaining at the microbial level or stopping its multicellular streak at brainless jellyfish types. But conservatively avoiding new niches and plateaus doesn't seem to be on evolution's menu. Once arriving at greater complexity, and thereby yielding more complicated ecologies, maybe p-zombie awareness just couldn't cut the mustard anymore for some of those biological organisms (as contrasted with lesser life and artificial entities engineered now or in the future). Perhaps it took too long for them to become competent when restricted to an insensible robot type of awareness. IF they could ever become confident and skilled with such at all before getting killed or out-competed by creatures armed with experiential consciousness. To wit:

Back in the late '60s, Nicholas Humphrey encountered a blindsight monkey named Helen. She usually gazed blankly and sat around listlessly -- as expected for a primate missing its primary visual cortex, or like a conventional blind monkey. But he did succeed in coaxing Helen to respond to an alternative channel of optical information processed by a primitive, sub-cortical visual system. Still, despite having success at getting the monkey to react to objects and circumstances in her environment, Humphrey concluded that her blindsight-guided behavior wasn't an effective enough or stable way of "seeing":

"Yet I was pretty sure her vision was not normal. I knew her too well. We had spent so many hours together, while I continually wondered what it was like to be her. And, although I found it hard to put my finger on what was wrong, my sense was that she still did not really believe that she could see. There were telling hints in her behavior. For example, if she was upset or frightened, she would stumble about as if she was in the dark again. It was as if she could only see provided she did not try too hard.

"[...] In 1972 I wrote an article for the New Scientist, and on the front cover of the magazine they put the headline, under Helen's portrait, 'a blind monkey that sees everything.' But this headline surely was not right. Not everything. My own title for the paper inside the magazine was 'Seeing and Nothingness,' and I went on to argue that this was a kind of seeing of which we had never before had any inkling." --Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness

 

[wellwisher]

First of all we don't know much about consciousness, but anyways I feel that its actually against evolution.

Consciousness allows you to be stupid, dumb, makes you do things that are harmful for survival.

You could easily be a collection of 'inputs and outputs' like a 'robot' of sorts with the computing powers of our brain, and you'd go through life pretty nicely. A lot of species survive without having 'consciousness'.

1. Consciousness is first of all unnecessary, it provides no benefit over a robot with the computing capabilities that of our brain.

2. It creates cases of harm to survival as well.

3. Consciousness provides no extra meaningful information to be useful

I would argue if you have 2 species of humans, one with consciousness and one without, holding all other things constant like the ability to process information. That the one who is unconscious is better fit to survive.

So where are the unconscious human 'robots'

Humans have two centers of consciousness. The center you are describing is often called the ego or the conscious mind. There is also the inner self which is the consciousness center associated with the unconscious mind. The ego center only uses about 10% of the brain. The inner self uses 90%.

Free will and choice is a relative concept. This is relative to the inner self and instinct. Animals do not have free will, because they only have an inner self, and therefore there is no relative gap between centers for free choice. The ego is unique to humans and appeared as a second center quite recently in time.

If we get an ape mad, he will have superhuman strength because his inner self uses his whole brain. The 10% used by the ego, sets up walls, that makes it harder to get a full 100% brain action, unless the inner self suspends the ego for an emergency; the little lady lifts the car to save her child.

Humans have natural instincts within the inner self that comes with the DNA, but the ego, via education and culture can repress and perverse these, via free will and choice. The result is a conflict between the inner self and the ego, that shows up as compulsions and obsessions; perverse is more energetic than natural (litmus test). This higher energy level creates the illusion that the ego is using more of the brain, because it indirectly does, via the inner self reaction to the wall created with natural.

This is not the same as natural instinct, where the inner self leads the ego. This orientation is where most religions attempt to go. The meek and mild ego, relative to the deity center (inner self) apart from the mass mind of the ego, implies a more open and reception ego, less prone to inner self repression. There is weaker energy due to less inner self repression feedback.

The saying that strength is perfected in weakness, is connected to the ego helping the inner self, by making the ego less of an energy drain, until the inner rewards the ego with a type of transformation; saint. Self preservation will not allow the inner self to give too much influence to an irrationally willful ego; self destruction like war. But if the ego earns the trust of the inner self, it becomes a conduit of the lord; inner self.