On 10/24/2019 2:29 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:
Later, Humphrey seems to be a realist about consciousness. When he comes to the question of how human consciousness evolved, his remarkable suggestion is that it is adaptive and has survival value principally because it allows for "self-esteem, coupled with self-entrancement". "Your Ego… this awesome treasure island… never ceases to amaze and fascinate you." And since this is tremendously pleasurable, you very much want to go on living. The gloomier among us may doubt this, finding Hamlet nearer the mark. The deeper problem with the self-entrancement theory is that natural selection can select implacably for an intense instinct of self-preservation without using consciousness at all.
But for an intelligent social species this "instinct" will have to include the ability to model oneself in interactions with others and to include the fact that they will model you. This kind of self-awareness is the highest order to self-reference that philosophers revere as "consciousness". There are certainly plenty of other levels of consciousness in which ego doesn't appear and you're not thinking about personal survival. Again it is a mistake derived from Plato's mysticism and the desire for immortality that makes consciousness a kind of separate soul substance, a single thing that can survive the death of the mechanism that produced it.
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