-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Kim Jones Sent: Saturday, July 19, 2014 11:37 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: It Knows That It Knows
> On 20 Jul 2014, at 3:51 pm, LizR <[email protected]> wrote: > > It could be that language constructs the self (or perhaps more precisely that using language allowed us to create the concept of a self as one amongst many linguistic concepts). >>I don't grok this thing of the self 'evolving' like brains and thumbs. We surely didn't create the concept of the self. The self did not evolve. It switched ON. We do not know enough about the self to make definitive statements about its nature. First off one needs to take a census of the species that have self-awareness. If we want to speak of "self" it behooves us to look around at other species that we can agree -- based on evidence -- experience some kind of "self". I doubt that a crow's sense of self is like our own, but I have no doubt that these complex smart social creatures experience self-awareness (they pass the mirror test). An Orca is a self-aware culture making animal and quite clearly also unlike either a Crow or a Hominid. The point I am belaboring here is that even just on our planet there seems to be at least a few other self-aware species imbued with a sense of self... that is aware and can make abstract plans. Why are you so sure that "self" just switches on like that. Do say Gibbons have no self? Or even dogs and cats -- who are not able to pass the mirror test -- have they therefore zero self? Even simple animals exhibit individual personality, is not this evidence of a nascent proto-self. Why can't "self" evolve? Why does it have to suddenly explode onto the scene where an instant before there was nothing at all. >> It awoke. There was a moment. It was a moment in history. Kind of like the ape and the bone in Kubrick's '2001'. Beautiful seminal film by the way... when you say awoke, isn't that another way of saying it emerged? It may be that some substance consumed altered consciousness. From that moment forward, there was a signal difference. The possibility of suffering being a very large one. >> I don't think, along with Russell Standish, that ants are conscious, for example - but individuals may share in a group 'self'. Social insects however have incredibly complex lives when one looks at the entire hive. Ant cultures have been studied and have revealed a surprisingly complex and very strategic shifting of alliances and kinds of relationships (from outright enslavement, to tribute-paying relationships, to alliances between neighboring ant colonies and species.) Termite mounds, ant colonies, hives are all admirable self-healing adaptive organisms (always changing, which can be seen by looking at time lapsed photos). Are you sure there can be no meta-self-awareness operating at some hive level. I was surprised by the apparent complexity of social insect interactions -- both within a colony and at the colony to colony level. Perhaps this is all just algorithmic and genetically programmed behavior, but social insects are quite adaptive and exhibit both strategic and tactical behaviors that are intriguing. >>Selfhood is independent of minds or of contents of minds or the precision or mental acuity (perception) of minds. It appears to be the kind of knowledge of something that cannot be demonstrated in any 3p way. Why are you so certain that selfhood is independent of minds. It seems rather more likely to me that selfhood emerges within minds of sufficient complexity and that there is no hard line between having consciousness and having none at all. Chris K -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
