Hi MD,
This is another tidbit from "The Journal of Consciousness Studies".
What do you think?
Why did consciousness evolve in animals? Consciousness and Human Identity,
edited by John Cornwell has chapters contributed by Olaf Sporns and Balleine &
Dickinson, which might throw light on this issue. I would interpret their
joint contribution, as it applies to evolution, in the following way:
Animals were increasingly faced by environmental variabilty as they started to
move around and they had to select from that environment that which was
beneficial to their survival. If the environment had remained stable and
predictable an instructionist system would have sufficed, much as
instructionist input suffices for our computers. The tremendous variability in
the environment called for equivalent variability in nervous systems as
animals sought to match their own biological requirements to the environment.
As animals evolved to forms with more complex behaviours, environmental
variabilty became greater, requiring adaptation of the nervous system to a
frankly selectionist approach. Trial and error won the day.
Organisms, even animals like humans, have no way of directly inspecting their
own mechanistic biological states, so their biological requirements have to
make themselves evident in a way that can be readily interpreted. This
resulted, eventually, in the conscious experience of desire. Consciousness
evolved as a basic function that presented a particular physiological state of
the organism as an affective response, so allowing the grounding of desires in
the biology and the pursuit of things that had biological utility. Cognitive
acts were a later add-on.
All sounds very convincing to me.
David Friend
-- Len MaurerMOQ Homepage - http://www.moq.org Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
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