[Arlo reposts] Arlo would still like answers to these questions. [Arlo asked Ham] The mechanism by which consciousness evolves is....
[Ham] ...the individuation of 'being-aware' from the Sensibility/Otherness dichotomy. [Arlo] This makes no sense, and certainly is not an answer to the question. I'm not sure if you're deliberately obfuscating here to avoid an answer you know would be ridiculous, but it seems clear that you simply have no answer. Despite claims about what is NOT, you can offer nothing about what IS. You said, quite clearly, "consciousness evolves from genus to species". That is, over generations consciousness evolves, successive generations of early man had improved consciousnesses over their predecessors. This is YOUR claim. And yet, when asked a simple question about HOW this happens, you retreat into smoke and evasion. Physiologists would say that consciousness evolves because of genetic mutations and changes in the neurobiology of primates over time that are passed on through DNA. Social theorists would say that consciousness evolves because socialization unleashed a collective unconscious that is added to with each successive generation an so primates assimilating this collective will, with each passing generation, assimilate something greater. Both of these answers (which you deny) are straightforward answers to "how and why consciousness evolves, how and why it changes over time". You deny these, and yet can offer no answer whatsoever (the jumblygook above is NOT an answer to this question) as to how your lauded "consciousness" becomes greater/more evolved in subsequent generations of primates. The ONLY answer I can draw from your posts is that "Essence" simply bestows upon subsequent generations of many "new and improved" models of consciousness each generation. And even to this you seem incapable of speculating as to "why"? Why did "On High" give early pre-primates a very unsophisticated consciousness and yet give us moderns a much more sophisticated consciousness. Your answer, "as him", was amusing but another evasion. [Arlo had asked] What changed between early primates without consciousness and humans with consciousness is... [Ham] ...the development of consciousness. [Arlo] Clever, but even a gradeschooler sees the circularity in that. Again, YOUR claim was that early on in the evolutionary timeline there existed some distant ancestor of "man" that lacked consciousness, call him a pre-pre-primate. You claim also that at some point in the timeline consciousness appears. I ask, again, what changed that prompted this appearance? Physiologists would point to a specific genetic mutation (or several). Social theorists would, as I've said, point to a time when neural evolution led to the unintended consequence of shared attention which beget social symbolic activity. You DENY both of these, but offer nothing, and I mean NOTHING as an alternative. The closest thing to an answer I could read from your posts was "Essence poofed consciousness into the timeline", a sort of Divine Intervention when "God" went "Abracadabra!" and suddenly there existed "consciousness". But, you deny this as well. So I ask again, into this timeline spanning "no consciousness" among pre-pre-primates and "consciousess" among latter man, what changed that precipitated consciousness' appearance? Your little jabs about my "inability to understand" are funny, but I'll be open to anyone else in this forum who can explain to me how what you give are "answers" to my questions. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
