What is the ultimate use of “consciousness” in the natural world? Of what advantage is consciousness for the individual? The main question: if we assume that many living things – such as all plants, presumably all or most instects, and al or most inverterates – have little or no consciousness , of what advantage could it be for higher animals such as ourselves and other mammals and primates?
The above is discussion I had in my psychology class. Thought I’d post it here to know what you guys here on SDMB think?
Not necessarily. Consciousness may be a product of evolution of the brain, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that it is usefu, in any Darwinistic sense of increasing our survivability. It might well be entirely neutral and have no bearing whatever on the success of our species as a species
As a culture, however, its the whole ball game. Now that we have written language, etc., the whole Darwin thing breaks down for us, we evolve as a culture with lightning speed, something quite impossible with plodding evolution. Who knows how many millions of years it took to evolve this particular smarty-pants ape, but its the last hundred thousand years that really count.
In the natural world, it may count for very little. We have little if any connection with that world, we are the mutants, unnatural R Us.
The question assumes that the material universe can exist independent of consciousness, that consciousness is IN the natural world, rather then the nature world being in consciousness.
If the natural world, or the universe is causally closed, in that there is no link in the chain of cause and effect that is consciousness, then it could all happen without an observer.
If it can all happen without an observer (or consciousness) then I am the observer and not the observed, since it doesn’t need me the observer.
Meaning, if consciousness has no effect, I as the observer of it, am like a audience watching a play.
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However if the perceived is dependent on the perceiver, in that they are one and the same then I am what I perceive. Consciousness is the observed universe (and transcends it) and the universe could no more be here without me then I could be here without it. (here meaning, this existence)
Extro: One definitition of consciousness is “knowledge of one’s own existence, condition, sensations, mental operations, acts, etc.” Is that what you had in mind?
Consciousness allows me to observe and evaluate my survival strategies and make deliberate (that is, conscious) changes to improve my chances of success, reducing my degree of dependence on instinct and reflex.
I agree. And another thing that is often speculated is that consciousness is not nearly as coherent a thing as we believe it to be. There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that “consciousness” is actually a series of rather disjointed thoughts that are somehow synthesized in our memory.
My apologies for reposting what I’ve reposted in the Chinese AI thread. I link its original thread. But your class would be interested in this article which takes the evolutionary perspective on self-representations and consciousness. Shot version: self-representations begin at a basic immunologic level and upgrade with the advent of neurologic systems. A more complex neurologic system has multiple self-representations that it keeps coherent within a meta-representation that must get constantly re-updated. The greater the system’s ability to hold a complex meta-representation of “self” as opposed to the “outside” world, the greater its consciousness.
I would say that being self aware is a bad survival trait. With consciousness a creature can be depressed, commit suicide, not want to live, make wars, commit murder, destroy an entire planet, build a “species” that could wipe out and replace it, you get the picture. Not to mention religion and all the problems that causes.
We’ll all find out in the next few decades how much of a survival trait consciousness and inteligence is.
Consciouseness is an aid to learning how to deal with new or unfamiliar circumstances. If a person with amnesia is told the same joke 50 times, they will laugh 50 times. If a person with normal memory function notices that the same joke is being repeated they will consciously decide to remember that, and accost the crummy joke-teller when next they try for an easy laugh.
This joke example has little survival value, but similar repetitive situations with implications for survival do crop up frquently in the natural world.
Modern phiolosophy by and large defines consciousness as the ability to ‘reflect’ on our thoughts and perceptions. Seeing something is seperate from being aware that you’re seeing something. It is this consciousness that allows us to draw inferences from individual thoughts and experiences.
This terminology of this theory varies and can cause some confusion. Thought is defined as a number of things, varying from simple perception to consciousness itself.
Maybe a somewhat clumsy example would help. The basic principle is that consciousness is what enables us to reflect on our idea of “Pink” and “Monkey” to construct an image of a Pink Monkey - something an unconscious being that has seen monkeys and the colour pink cannot do.
If it operates in this manner, consciousness would be useful as it enables us to examine and explore areas that are outside our direct experiential capabilities.
there is a radical distinction between “consciousness” and “physical-responsiveness.”
It seems to me that everything a human body “does,” its every mode of conduct or behavior, might be done by a machine EVEN IF we suppose said machine to exist at all times in the state we call “unconsciousness”–the state we are in during, eg, an absolutely dreamless sleep.
Now it happens to be the case that our bodies just lie there when we are in such a state. But it might have been otherwise, and one can imagine it being otherwise with ambulatory “robots.” They move about, pick things up, react to waves of light and sound, call-up stored routines, even (in a way) initiate new actions. One might suppose a perfect machine of that sort, so perfect that NO POSSIBLE TEST would ever allow one to distinguish it from “the sort of entity I find myself to be.” Yet I have defined it as lacking the waking consciousness that I know I have. To be conscious is to have experiences, not merely to physically react to the environment.
I suspect consciousness serves no function whatsoever as regards the participation of our bodies in the physical world. Its use and function is to be sought elsewhere.
