Jochen,
I CRINGE when anybody calls me an expert, but I have to admit that in my last
job, I served as an evolutionary psychologist. Before that, I was a
comparative psychologist, ethologist, and sociobiologists, more or less in that
order. Unfortunately, any of these roles would designate me as a person who
should feel guilty if he cannot shed light on your question.
I skimmed the article, but not Humphreys book, obviously. Articles drive me
wild that purport to explain human beings but which begin by asserting them as.
Explanations must inevitably place the explained thing in a wider context and,
thereby, render it less unique just to extent that they are successful. So,
such articles (and perhaps the book on which this one is based) always make me
feel that the author is trying to have his cake and eat it to, the cake being
to be a scientist and the eating of the cake being to sell large numbers of
books to readers who want to feel that they are unique.
I am also not particularly keen on the notion that
consciousness is private, which appears as a premise of the article. To me, my
consciousness is just the set of events and objects to which I am responding;
to the extent that you respond to those same events and objects, you share my
consciousness. A FRIAM member once asserted to me that I didn’t “believe that
crap” which ironically seemed to prove me right, since on his account he had to
be a party to my consciousness to be in a position to make such a statement. I
will attach a little bit of light reading (really!) which will give you an idea
how somebody might actually come to “believe that crap”. It may not get past
the FRIAM message size limit, in which case I won’t attach it.
Finally, I think that Humphreys identification of “consciousness” with meta
consciousness is preposterously narrow. Even conceding that definition,
however, I am not prepared to rule out the idea that some animals engage in
meta-conscious behavior. Predators, observing their prey when they are not
actually hunting, seem to be discovering the factors to which the prey are
responding … i.e., adopting their consciousness.
As for language, it undoubtedly affords greater co-ordination of behavior with
respect to events and objects not immediately before the animals that are
coordinating … i.e., the sharing of consciousness.
I think the plain fact is that I am not terribly interested in the question of
how and why humans are unique. We are unique, I guess, in the scale and
grandeur of the mess we are making. (The only predecessors that I can think of
are those creatures that poisoned themselves to extinction by producing
oxygen.) Beyond that obvious fact, the best way to approach the question would
be, I would suppose, work hard for a couple of hundred years to show all the
ways in which humans are like animals and then, if that project fails, sweep
the leftover bits up into a pile and call it human uniqueness.
All the best,
Nick
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of
ERIC P. CHARLES
Sent: Saturday, February 19, 2011 6:14 PM
To: Jochen Fromm
Cc: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The cognitive niche
Jochen,
I'm not Nick, but we usually think pretty similarly about these issues, so I
will attempt a short answer:
The most obvious problem with Humphrey's hypothesis is that lots of things that
are not humans are conscious.
The problems with Pinker's hypothesis are much more awkward to explain. One
relatively light weight problem is that it is much more natural to think of our
cognitive prowess as relying on our linguistic ability, but Pinker's theory
would require that we be in the 'cognitive niche' before we evolved language.
(A more complex problem is that Pinker's theory is inherently incompatible with
Darwin's notion of evolution, which was about the distribution of traits over
geographic space. Things that are useful everywhere cannot, by definition,
count as adaptations. But that is a messy, messy can of worms.)
Eric
P.S. Most modern evolutionary psychologists would have very different opinions
about these issues than Nick and I.
On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 05:37 PM, "Jochen Fromm" <[email protected]> wrote:
Nick,
you are an expert in evolutionary psychology.
Do you agree with Humphrey's hypotheses that
human consciousness is an adaptation to living
in a society of selves and Pinker's similar idea
that language is an adaptation to the cognitive
niche? see http://bit.ly/dOeRLZ
-J.
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Eric Charles
Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601
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