Evolution: Is there any survival value for human consciousness?

At the heart of Zoltan Torey's original theory of consciousness lies the unique human capacity for language. Not merely referring to our physical ability to communicate with speech or sign, Torey is pointing to the potent interior landscape that language makes possible, a landscape that bestows upon us the capacity for self reflection, complex analysis, and the ability to choose how and when to act. It is in this language-enabled interiority where self-awareness arises, where consciousness is experienced, where free will is exercised, and where we humans stand alone and above all other earthly forms of life—no longer shackled to the purely mechanical reflexes of our biology.
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This may be of interest: LINK: The Crucible of Consciousness: An Integrated Theory of Mind and Brain; Zoltan Torey
 
Lowpro said:
For the love of God...

http://www.questforconsciousness.com/

just....read something substantive please -.- all of you.
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For the love of the universe...

http://www.amazon.com/Symbolic-Species-Co-evolution-Language-Brain/dp/0393317544

just...read something substantive please -.- you!


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See how silly that is? If you have something to say, say it and -- you might try the two books I mentioned above, both of which link language with consciousness.
 
For the love of Spaceman Spiff!

http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Calv...=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1320816335&sr=1-1

No I agree it's silly, but there still isn't even a consensus on what intelligence is, on what consciousness is, or on what self awareness is and I've tried to stick to this thread to at least learn WHAT you guys are talking about but STILL there's no consensus.

So yea I threw this book in there so we can at least have something to work from.

I'd MUCH rather discuss Calvin and Hobbes though...
 
MuDPhuD said:
Is a blind deaf-mute person (e.g. Helen Keller) who never learns sign language or Braille conscious?. Does he/she have intelligence? Is he/she capable of forming memories? Does "consciousness" vary in any way with the obvious variation in memory and intelligence between a human with trisomy 21, a musical savant, or Steve Jobs? Does a chimp who learns sign language or a parrot who learns to communicate with us by using our own words suddenly become "conscious"?

As always these discussions inevitably devolve into semantic arguments because of lack of clear definition of terms (specifically "consciousness"). Even the science of NCC is problematic in that all the experiments conflate attention with consciousness.

Self awareness, attention, intelligence, planning, memory, communication, emotion and sensory perception are all aspects of brain activity, and all of these brain functions are also found in other animals. The human's ability to plan is more detailed, his system of communication is (as far as we are so far aware) more elaborate, but he does not possess any ability that is not present in other living forms on planet earth. Indeed other animals hear things we do not hear, see things we do not see, and perform feats of strength and skill of which we are not capable.

All the various aspects discussed so far here as "consciousness" will be altered by brain damage, or by chemical or electrical interference in brain activity; i.e., they are brain functions.

If you mean by "consciousness" (as I think you do), our subjective feeling of being here, alive, perceiving the world around us, within our own shell separate from those around us, then your question as to whether it is evolutionarily adaptive is misguided IMHO. That feeling you have of being you is your brain doing what it does, and it isn't any different than what your dog's brain is doing when he decides he needs to pee and comes to find you to let him out (sensing, remembering, planning, and communicating the plan to achieve his goal).

Brain function is clearly evolutionarily adaptive; consciousness is just a vague term that we all seem to understand but that nobody can really pin down.
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I agree with this.

Perpetual Student said:
For the love of the universe...

http://www.amazon.com/Symbolic-Species-Co-evolution-Language-Brain/dp/0393317544
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This I don't know, the very first bit on the amazon review: "Terrence Deacon's The Symbolic Species begins with a question posed by a 7-year-old child: Why can't animals talk? Or, as Deacon puts it, if animals have simpler brains, why can't they develop a simpler form of language to go with them?" is very suspect.

Symbolic Representation by Pigeons

Thomas R. Zentall, Department of Psychology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506–0044

Abstract:

"The capacity for symbolic representation is a prerequisite for the development of human language because words, the basic units of language, are symbols that represent things. But symbolic representation may also serve a nonlinguistic role of organizing events into categories having the same meaning, and such a capacity could have considerable survival value for many species. In a number of experiments, my co-workers and I have found that pigeons that are trained to treat two different stimuli similarly also learn that those stimuli are commonly represented and, thus, that they have the same meaning. We have demonstrated evidence for such common representations in a number of ways, but perhaps the most convincing is when pigeons learn a new association involving one of the presumed commonly represented stimuli, and without further training demonstrate that they have learned a similar association involving the other stimulus. Furthermore, we have found that when pigeons are trained to treat two stimuli similarly, one of those stimuli is represented in terms of the other. These results have implications not only for the generality of cognitive processes across species, but also for the generality of symbolic representation beyond language use."

and pigeons are stooopid :D and very superstitious.
 
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General thought on all this:

1) Intelligence
2) Consciousness
3) Self-awareness

They seem to come in that order, but the only thing we are even partially able to substantiate is intelligence. We know that intelligence is not binary; it is a continuous scale from zero to, presumably, infinity.

Based on our current knowledge, a good working assumption is that consciousness and self awareness are properties that emerge somewhere on that scale, as a result of intelligence, in the mentioned order.

Hans
 
Perpetual Student said:
Helen Keller
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Yes, interesting, but are we sure we know what she means by "consciousness"? As repeatedly pointed out it is a notoriously vague term.
Any thoughts on the rest of my queries? Does consciousness vary with the obvious variability in human capacity for memory and intelligence? Are the chimps who learn to sign conscious and those who don't not conscious? Is Alex the parrot conscious if he understands what we ask him, and tells us what he wants with words, while other African Greys are not conscious?
 
MRC_Hans said:
General thought on all this:

1) Intelligence
2) Consciousness
3) Self-awareness

They seem to come in that order, but the only thing we are even partially able to substantiate is intelligence. We know that intelligence is not binary; it is a continuous scale from zero to, presumably, infinity.

Based on our current knowledge, a good working assumption is that consciousness and self awareness are properties that emerge somewhere on that scale, as a result of intelligence, in the mentioned order.

Hans
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What current knowledge are you talking about?

Forgive if I got the wrong impression but you seem to want to hang on to the idea that humans are somehow, in some way, quite different to other animals and 'special'.
 
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Cheetah said:
What current knowledge are you talking about?
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I'm not aware of any knowledge that can take us any farther than what I mentioned.

Forgive if I got the wrong impression but you seem to want to hang on to the idea that humans are somehow, in some way, quite different to other animals and 'special'.
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Then I did not make myself clear. Intelligence, consciousness, and self awareness - wise, I do think humans distinguish themselves from other currently know life-forms, but only quantitatively. We are more intelligent, more conscious, more self aware than other animals. The fact alone that we are having this discussion indicates that.

What I was trying to do was sum up:

There is a scale of intelligence, ranging from zero (plants and probably some insects), over dogs, chimps, and humans, to ... Ed knows what. - I am assuming that there is no theoretical limit to intelligence.

Somewhere along this scale, consciousness emerges, presumably as an emergent property of intelligence, and also rises in sophistication, for all we know roughly proportional to intelligence.

Seemingly farther along the scale, what we call self awareness arises. At least what methods we have to detect self awareness only appear to find something in the most intelligent species.

Hans
 
OK, sorry, I get it now, thanks.

Do you think consciousness and self-awareness could work in the same manner as intelligence, arising somewhere with a brain of a certain complexity and with a value of close to zero and then working it's way up the scale or do you think its an all-or-nothing thing?
 
Perpetual Student said:
There is no scientific evidence that bees are conscious. In fact there is reason to believe that bees are biological machines with rudimentary intelligence but no consciousness.
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What's the scientific evidence that humans are conscious?

Personally, I think "consciousness" is simply a word to describe the normal functioning of a brain. As such, it has an obvious evolutionary benefit, since intelligence helps one survive and reproduce (at least for a certain number of generations; it may be deadly in the long run).
 
How would you even differentiate "zero consciousness" vs "very very little consciousness"? A child who has just learned how to count will have a very difficult time understanding that numbers exist between 0 and 1, for instance, much less being able to visualize them. I have a bit of an arthropod-collecting hobby and agree that they basically act like predictable automatons with no memory, but that's from a human viewpoint, and we may just have a very difficult time recognizing the difference between almost-zero consciousness and zero consciousness.
 
sol invictus said:
What's the scientific evidence that humans are conscious?
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There is none! Virtually all humans (at least the ones I know) claim to be conscious, even though the term cannot be scientifically demonstrated. Nevertheless, consciousness is a continuing area of scientific research as demonstrated by the many serious attempts by scientists to define and explain it.

Personally, I think "consciousness" is simply a word to describe the normal functioning of a brain. As such, it has an obvious evolutionary benefit, since intelligence helps one survive and reproduce (at least for a certain number of generations; it may be deadly in the long run).
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I think that's a cop-out. There is little reason to believe bees have consciousness even though their brains function normally.
 
Then I did not make myself clear. Intelligence, consciousness, and self awareness - wise, I do think humans distinguish themselves from other currently know life-forms, but only quantitatively. We are more intelligent, more conscious, more self aware than other animals. The fact alone that we are having this discussion indicates that.
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Terrence Deacon, in his book, The Symbolic Species argues otherwise. He takes the position that human language makes humans unique in having consciousness. The rudimentary forms of communication of other species do not qualify as language (he argues) because of the unique symbolic nature of human language.
 
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Perpetual Student said:
What's the scientific evidence that humans are conscious?
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There is none! Virtually all humans (at least the ones I know) claim to be conscious, even though the term cannot be scientifically demonstrated.
...
I think that's a cop-out. There is little reason to believe bees have consciousness even though their brains function normally.
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The two halves of your statement seem to be in some tension. If there is no evidence for human consciousness and the term cannot be "scientifically demonstrated", why bother to mention that "There is little reason to believe bees have consciousness" as if that's in contrast to the case of humans?
 
sol invictus said:
The two halves of your statement seem to be in some tension. If there is no evidence for human consciousness and the term cannot be "scientifically demonstrated", why bother to mention that "There is little reason to believe bees have consciousness" as if that's in contrast to the case of humans?
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Yes, my two statements are in tension. But that reflects the nature of the dilemma that consciousness presents -- it seems that it cannot be scientifically demonstrated to exist, yet it's the subject of very serious scientific research and discussion.
I would say that the above is true because we all have an intense sense of our own consciousness, can report it one-another and discuss it; however, it is a totally subjective experience defying objective demonstration.
I have done some reading about various theories of consciousness over the years and I suspect that those who link it with language are on to something.
 
Perpetual Student said:
Terrence Deacon, in his book, The Symbolic Species argues otherwise.
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Seriously Perpetual Student, I would be very skeptical of that book, seems to me that Terrence Deacon set out with the aim of proving the uniqueness of humans and how they fundamentally differ from other animals in their thought process and the way in which they experience the world. I haven't read it though, so might be wrong.
 
Cheetah said:
Seriously Perpetual Student, I would be very skeptical of that book, seems to me that Terrence Deacon set out with the aim of proving the uniqueness of humans and how they fundamentally differ from other animals in their thought process and the way in which they experience the world. I haven't read it though, so might be wrong.
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Well, I certainly do not have the expertise to advocate his position on this or any other forum. I found his book well written and his arguments persuasive. So, I would say, yes, you might be wrong, but -- you might be right.
 
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