No. Consciousness is not information. It is an additional process that handles its own generated information. I you don´t recognize the driving mechanism towards order in the universe, you will be running on empty. This driving mechanism is natural selection. Things gets selected, replicated and selected again.
In the case of humans, time ago the evolutionary psychologists and philosophers (Dennet etc) discovered the evolutionary nature of consciousness, that is double: For social animals, consciousness keeps an actualized image of how the others see ourselves. This ability is very important in order to plan future actions with/towards others members. A memory of past actions, favors and offenses are kept in memory for consciousness processing. This is a part of our moral sense, that is, our navigation device in the social environment. Additionally, by reflection on ourselves, the consciousness module can discover the motivations of others. The evolutionary steps for the emergence of consciousness are: 1) in order to optimize the outcome of collaboration, a social animal start to look the others as unique individuals, and memorize their own record of actions. 2) Because the others do 1, the animal develop a sense of itself and record how each one of the others see himself (this is adaptive because 1). 3) This primitive conscious module evolved in 2 starts to inspect first and lately, even take control of some action with a deep social load. 4) The conscious module attributes to an individual moral self every action triggered by the brain, even if it driven by low instincts, just because that´s is the way the others see himself as individual. That´s why we feel ourselves as unique individuals and with an indivisible Cartesian mind. The consciousness ability is fairly recent in evolutionary terms. This explain its inefficient and sequential nature. This and 3 explains why we feel anxiety in some social situations: the cognitive load is too much for the conscious module when he tries to take control of the situation when self image it at a stake. This also explain why when we travel we feel a kind of liberation: because the conscious module is made irrelevant outside our social circle, so our more efficient lower level modules take care of our actions --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---