5 ms·
It's far too early to tell if consciousness is adaptive. Has it enabled humans to be wildly successful? In the short term, sure! But the long term is unclear.
by wpietri 4y ago
It's far too early to tell if consciousness is adaptive. Has it enabled humans to be wildly successful? In the short term, sure! But the long term is unclear.
E.g., look at how the technological progress it makes is at risk of destroying human civilization. A series of ecological boom/bust cycles could lead toward negative selection for consciousness. Or we might manage to wipe out ourselves or, say, most mammals, leading life on earth to start over as it did 65m years ago.
But even without that, it's not clear to me that consciousness will really win out. Look at the number of successful people who are not only painfully unreflective, but need to be to keep doing what they're doing. I could name a lot of people, but today's good example is Alex Jones, whose whole (very profitable) schtick is based on refusing to be fully conscious of what he's saying: https://popehat.substack.com/p/alex-jones-at-the-tower-of-babel https://popehat.substack.com/p/alex-jones-at-the-tower-of-ba...
And this is hardly a new idea. Vonnegut wrote a novel where humans end up evolving into something like a sea lion. The point being "all the sorrows of humankind were caused by 'the only true villain in my story: the oversized human brain'", an error evolution ends up remedying.
- fatherzine 4y agoHardly a new ideea indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_the_knowledge_of_good_and_evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_the_knowledge_of_good_... Edit: To be clear, I posit that consciousness is the organ that enables us to distinguish between Good and Evil.
- wpietri 4y agoI doubt that consciousness is an organ, but if it were, it's distinct from a moral sense, because we share that with animals. Here's a good book on the topic: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674356610 https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674356610 That same professor has done a bunch more work on the topic, as have many others.
- fatherzine 4y agoFrans de Waal has done great work. Evolution is a strange phenomenon. I invite us to marvel at the transformation of terrestrial quadrupeds into majestic aquatic creatures, over eons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cetaceans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cetaceans Evolutionary speaking, cetaceans "share" the front limbs with quadrupeds. And yet there is a qualitatively distinct functional difference. Consider that moral consciousness, as present in humans, is functionally not quite the same as its biological precursor, the moral sense present in dogs or gorillas. And, of course, there are gradual changes along the evolutionary way. Edit: "Organ", more precise "sensory organ", as in "the visual organ". Perhaps there is a better word here than "organ" here, before we get lost in the medical distinction between eye / retina / optic nerve / cortex / etc.
- wpietri 4y agoSure. Nothing is the same. Every animal is slightly different. As humans trying to understand the world with 3 pounds of meat, we abstract and group so we have a chance of dealing with the overwhelming complexity. But I stand by my point. A moral sense is something that provably exists in a lot of social animals. Is it different in each species? Yes. Is it different in each individual? Surely. But unless you're going to claim that all of those animals are conscious, you can't say that consciousness is foundational to a moral sense. Indeed, I think the much easier argument is that a moral sense is foundational to evolving consciousness.
- fatherzine 4y agoWhy we should be reduce human morality to what can be "provably" found in other social animals? There are some rudimentary similarities, but those similarities do not circumscribe the entirety of human moral experience, not by a large stretch.
- wpietri 4y agoYou're now arguing against things I didn't say, so I think I'll leave this discussion here.