On Jul 5, 1:07 pm, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: > On 05 Jul 2011, at 11:42, Alberto G.Coronawrote: > > > Jost to introduce another point of view about consciousnees. The one > > that I think its right: > > > According with evolutionary Psychology, Consciousness evolved as an > > adaptation to social life. > > Are you sure you don't confuse consciousness and conscience. I think > that solitary primitive animals felt pain, and are thus consciouss > (although not necessarily self-conscious). > Depending on the pain and depending on the animal and the context. Following the theory exposed, self consciousness of pain, exist when the animal know that other individuals can take actions to alleviate it. Social Animals grown t in isolation don´t cry (including humans).
Of course either conscious or not, the animal must avoid the pain, but a non self aware animal may experiment pain just as you and me may experiment pain when we are deeply concentrated in an intellectual activity. the reactions to pain in this case are automatic. > > Broadly specaking, non social animals are > > unconscious and selfless. > > I tend to believe the contrary. The more an animal is social, the more > it could be self-less. Even humans can destroy the individual self by > using strong group identity. > That can happen sometimes. If you feel very good inside a group, why bother to control yourself?. Self awareness is not for social life as such, it is for avoiding conflicts and making profit of social interactions. If you are immersed in an activity where you feel free of conflicts, you dont need self awarenees. For example in a concert, or in a meeting with people who think like you, with your friends etc. Other situations where you feel selfless is when you travel to a foreign pacific place. where you are surronded by peaceful foreigners and your acts will not influence your future reputation at home. To feel selfless is probably one reason why people travel. > > interaction with them if I am aware of what the others expect from me. > > For this purpose, I must be aware and I must register, whathever I do > > that may affect to others. So I may unconsciously pick up a donut > > from the refrigerator and not even notice it, but I´m well aware of it > > when I´m fatty and my wife is looking. > > > Self conscious supervision of our acts is not for free. it adds an > > extra overload in the brain and in the way we do things that is > > visible to others. If the other that is looking is very important for > > us, we can experiment seizures. Conversely, the absence of self > > awareness is experimented as flowing. > > > To complete the picture, I must say that the awareness of spiritual > > beings that continuously supervise us is a further social instinct > > that make use of the self supervision machinery. This avoid > > machiavelic behaviours that may be deleterious for the group > > > Of course a machine can be designed to have such computational self > > awareness, but the question of if real self awareness is still open. > > In which theory? > This is more or less the theory of the evolutionary origin of self consciousness according with Evolutionary Psychology. This is more or less the consensus. Daniel Dennet wrote something about it. Pinker too. Evolution is parsimonious. It proceed step by step by accumulation functionalities in respionse to evolutionary pressures, in this case, mental modules that correspond to computational hardware in the brain. This is the most logical path that evolution may have follow. There are psico-phisical experiments that is according with this theory. There are experiments where the activity of both the motor signal of a hand and the cortex tissue that "control" the hand are measured. The "control" signal in the cortex appears one second after the motor signal when the test individual received the order to move the hand. this means that some other unconscious part does the real control, and the cortex just take note of the movement and assign the action to the self, when in reality, the action has been done already unconsciously. This is described by Pinker in some of its books. Presumably in "how the mind works". So, by definition, consciousness is causally efective. it is a mind module. Mind modules are not located in specifin spatially conected parts of the brain, they are distributed, in the same way that the file search in Microsoft windows is not located in a concrete zone of the PC hardware. In this case self consciousness is distributed in the human cortex. > Bruno > > > > > On Jul 1, 1:23 pm, selva kumar <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Is consciousness causally effective ? > > >> I found this question in previous threads,but I didn't find a answer. > > > -- > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > > Groups "Everything List" group. > > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > > [email protected] > > . > > For more options, visit this group > > athttp://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en > > . > > http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
