Ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, evolution has been the grand unifying theory of biology. Yet one of our most important biological traits, consciousness, is rarely studied in the context of evolution. Theories of consciousness come from religion, from philosophy, from cognitive science, but not so much from evolutionary biology. Maybe that’s why so few theories have been able to tackle basic questions such as: What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it?
The Attention Schema Theory (AST), developed over the past five years, may be able to answer those questions. The theory suggests that consciousness arises as a solution to one of the most fundamental problems facing any nervous system: Too much information constantly flows in to be fully processed. The brain evolved increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for deeply processing a few select signals at the expense of others, and in the AST, consciousness is the ultimate result of that evolutionary sequence. If the theory is right – and that has yet to be determined – then consciousness evolved gradually over the past half billion years and is present in a range of vertebrate species.
I know this really isn’t what you’d generally expect to be posted here, but the concept of consciousness – one of a small set of words in the English language I cannot spell from the top of my head without making errors – is one of those things that, when you think too deeply about it, you enter into a realm of thinking that can get deeply uncomfortable and distressing, like thinking about what’s outside the universe or what “existed” “before” (quotes intentional) the big bang.
Personally, I’m one of those insufferable people who ascribes the entire concept of consciousness to the specific arrangement of neurons and related tissue in our brain and wider nervous system – I don’t accept religion or some other specific magical thing that makes us humans (and dolphins? And chimpansees? And whatever else has some level of consciousness?) more special than any other animal in terms of consciousness.
I also don’t like the controversial concept of splitting consciousness up into an easy and a hard problem, because to me, that just opens the door to maintaining the religious idea that humans are somehow more special than other animals – sure, science has made it clear some other animals have easy consciousness, but humans are still special because we are the only ones with hard consciousness. It reeks of an artificial cutoff point created to maintain some semblance of uniqueness for homo sapiens sapiens so we can feel good about ourselves.
You can take the whole concept of consciousness in every which way, and one of my recent favourites is CGP Grey’s video The Trouble With Transporters, which, among other tings, poses the question – if you interrupt your consciousness by being teleported or going to sleep, are you really the same person when you rematerialise or wake up?
Have fun!
This is fascinating. I’m curious, given your views on consciousness in non-human animals, Thom – do you eat animals? And if so how do you reconcile that with your views?
Win ha loudly, huge, BUUURP
Here, have an anti-acid :/
I have the same views as Thom and eat animals.
Because in nature, conscious animals eat other conscious animals. This is not just us humans.
I don’t understand how consciousness works, but observation shows it has been this way for a long time before I started asking myself these questions.
If you are not taking the life of the animal, something else will: another animal or just time.
I do have a problem with cruelty (unnecessary suffering, and bad living conditions) and industrial animal exploitation. Not with killing and eating animals.
Edited 2016-06-07 07:31 UTC
In certain cultures throughout history humans have eaten other humans. Is this OK because If you are not taking the life of the human, something else will: another animal, human, or just time.
Zombies come to mind, but they generally prefer BRAIIINNNSSS
I was wondering the same thing. If we are just another kind of animal, and we eat animals, what’s wrong with eating human flesh?
Because we had time to think what would be better for humans rather than worrying what to have for next meal?
There are serious diseases when it comes to cannibalism. The taboo probably evolved biologically and only later gained a moral interpretation. Same deal as incest.
Human cannibalism has been present throughout human history and still continues today. As is true with eating the flesh of other animals, eating a diseased food source isn’t good for you and eating improperly prepared food isn’t good for you (assuming the food needs some sort of preparation). Eating from a healthy food source is ok, even if that food source is human flesh. Cannibalism isn’t favored in the animal kingdom because it’s counter-productive to a species existence, and/or unacceptable because of some moral basis.
I think he’s referring specifically to Kuru, though, possibly other prion diseases of the brain. These are especially bad, and can sit dormant for 20+ years, giving no indication that the person you are eating is infected.
Cooking your food may not be enough to destroy them, either.
Prions and slow, autoimmune syndrome related. Workers handling [and breathing] raw meat material at higher risk.
Bears eat bears, mostly cubs. Not sure if it was black or brown bears. Just a quick search on Google shows it applies to polar bears too. But they they don’t seem to care about how counter-productive it is. I heard a mother bear also has no problem eating her own cub after it was killed by an other.
Most animals live in constant danger of being eaten. Most Humans don’t.
Most animals eat to survive, not to enjoy.
Most animals don’t eat their own species, unless maybe it is necessary to survive.
Comparing humans to animals works on many levels, but also fails on many levels. And not all animals are alike either. The only thing that humans and animals all seem to share is an urge to survive as an individual, a group, and a species.
Interesting how the article mentions that consciousness is mostly approached from a philosophical point of view and that is exactly what is happening here.
I personally believe every human has a right to live. I also believe this right stops when you don’t honor it yourself (so if you kill someone, expect to be killed and don’t complain about it). I believe this simple principle is both moral and sensical
There seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that some of the more advanced animals also have a more advanced consciousness. This is my favorite anecdotal evidence; https://youtu.be/sPIcSriz_fM?t=1285
Isn’t that animals don’t kill for fun is an old myth by now?
Animals kill to survive. They are not going to waste energy or risk injury for something frivolous.
If you ask such a question, you should point to something that disproves it. I couldn’t really find anything that disproves it myself. The closest I came was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_killing and that mentions “surplus killing happens when circumstances are better than normal in order to procure food for offspring and others, to gain valuable killing experience, and to create the opportunity to eat the carcass later when they are hungry again”. “fun” isn’t mentioned
Not just certain cultures, most likely quite a number from our (yours and mine too) ancestors most likely have eaten human flesh under famine. not thousands or tens thousands of years but probably as recently as hundreds of years ago. Don’t be a racist.
You have no idea what my ancestral background is, which cultures I was referring to, or which race I am. Calling me racist out of pedantry is uncalled for.
Except certain cultures did eat the flesh of others as a cultural practice and tradition, and not just extreme necessity such as famine.
The mere mention of this practice is not racist. Get over yourself.
I just finished reading “Dies the Fire” by S.M. Stirling, and a minor subplot deals with cannibalism in the wake of the main plot device, the loss of all forms of electricity and high-pressure energy (gunpowder fizzles instead of exploding, steam engines can’t build pressure, etc) on Earth.
The author posits that it doesn’t take very long for starvation to cause certain groups of people to resort to cannibalism, and his position is that it drives the cannibals to insanity. They revert to an animal like mental state and stop functioning as “humans”. The protagonists consider them not worth living, and mercilessly hunt them down, only sparing the children who likely had no real idea what they were eating.
I don’t think the “he would have died anyway” defence would work in a murder trial.
Cattle have natural lifespans of around 20-25 years. Pigs and sheep live about 15-20 years. Even chickens live for 3-5 years.. That is 10-20x as long as they live when they are farmed.
The same way I look at a lion eating a gazelle.
That’s a flawed argument in a huge number of ways. The lion would die if it did not eat the gazelle. The lion has no other choice. The death of the gazelle can keep the lion and its young alive. The gazelle lives a natural life up until its death. The lion’s taste for the gazelle isn’t one of the major contributors to climate change.
1. Not all farming is inhumane.
2. I pay more for meat in order to get meat from animals treated responsibly.
3. I don’t eat a whole lot of meat to begin with, because it isn’t necessary to do so.
4. A ‘wild’ sheep or cow is just as likely to be murdered by predators as the gazelle. Your argument cuts both ways.
I don’t think it does. They only exist (particularly cows) because of farming. They’re not in balance with predators, and a wild animal has a fighting (or running) chance. That said, I’m in favour of greatly reducing the number of those animals, so within a generation if we stopped farming them there’d be very few of them. Factory farming is a bigger polluter than all the transport on the planet combined. We really have a responsibility to reduce their numbers rather than the breed-and-kill cycle we’re currently following.
The answer is humans are weird, hairless, tool using primates who have a fetish for accessorizing, and when stripped of all of our decorations, we ultimately just want to have sex, eat, not die, and get a little high.
Biologically, people are powered by sugar and fat. Sugar is rare in nature, but animals are excellent fat collection and storage units. Being the clever monkeys that we are, we figured out some species would be friendly to us if we fed and protected them. In return, we would eat some of them. It was win win.
Animal husbandry has been observed in other species, so it’s not unusual.
Unfortunately, we’re a little too clever for our own good, and we’ve taken everything to an extreme. We’ve learned the answers, but we haven’t learned the questions, which has resulted in the system being horribly distorted. What once was a symbiotic relationship has turned into a cancerous caricature, and we’ve ruined the quality along the way as well. We still hang onto the notion that we should eat tons of sugar and tons of meat, but in actuality, that is not what the human diet has looked like in any century except the last, skipping over nobility who could sort of approximate a modern diet at times.
I do agree with you about factory farms being huge polluters, and we need to do something about the policies that enable them.
To close, let’s indulge in your favorite intoxicant, char your favorite fat source, have consensual sex, and hopefully not die along the way. Yay, humans!
Very Flat Land Kind, your Species, no doubt
Cheers!
Why do you need to reconcile at all ??
Well, one has to look at survival. Everything on the planet that grows is a food source for something else. If we don’t eat the animals, do we eat the plants then? Why is it okay to torture plants, which have recently been proven to feel pain and have a consciousness of sorts?
http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/botany/plants-feel-pain.htm
We’re really at an early stage of understanding plants at this level. Given the lack of a central nervous system, it’s hard to imagine they experience anything like what we would consider pain. But even if plants do feel pain, they would almost certainly feel it less than a more complex creature, such as a cow.
But let’s pretend plant suffering exists – of course by eating animals you are doing nothing to prevent plant suffering since animals eat plants. You could crudely describe a cow as being a machine that turns plants into meat. Why not cut out the middle man and eat the plants directly? That certainly causes less suffering than eating the cow, which ate the plants. A cow will also eat a much greater amount of plants than humans would need to eat in order to get the same number of calories the cow’s meat provides.
Eating cow is really inefficient in general if compared to eating plants. Doesn’t matter what way you look at it: animal well being, plants, environmental, use of water, etc.
Imagine that infinitely into the future, We will go further down the food chain. Down to the point where We could jump out of it -fully sinterized food- if some emergency status requires it.
[So far in the future as -everybody will be eternally happy in (your version of paradise here)- to qualify as Religion].
Could also become the predators of our Sci-Fi Horror Movies. Bad dreams of others, surviving Species would be us. Aren’t we the bad dreams of the World, already?
Plants don’t feel pain, they simply don’t have the systems to do so. But, they do respond to stimulus and that can be interpreted as `feeling` something.
How is that different then anything else? Pain is just a stimulus we don’t like.
Plants have no capacity for like/dislike.
Even then, pain is more than just stimulus we don’t like. We have dedicated neural pathways that for handling pain, dedicated parts of the brain for handling pain, and even specific nerve receptors – insects lack these receptors, but some have functional equivalents, suggesting that many, if not most, insects do not feel pain.
Plants have none of these things. What they do have is a generalized system of physiological responses to various stimuli. This is not the same as pain, as humans also have a variety of physiological responses to various stimuli, both positive, and negative, that are not pain.
Since when is having a consciousness a criterium for not being considered someone’s meal? Isn’t that completely arbitrary?
I think what made us different was that we utterly dominated.
There are few (if any?) animals that can spend a day without worrying if there will be food or if we are going to be eaten. This allowed us to occupy that time with other tasks that wernt of immediate need or instict. Like Planning a hunt.
p.s. i am talking as a species, I am well aware there are people world wide Now who have these worries about food, hopefully less about being eaten though.
Food security has only existed for 150 years or so. Even Western Europe suffered massive peacetime famines as recently as the 1840s. In many places hunger is still an everyday reality.
Edited 2016-06-07 09:38 UTC
Long Term Food Security still a pipe dream.
Yeah. Moreover with this many of human alive. Plus 10.000 (estimate) baby born everyday, and will increase as time passes.
Minor nitpicks (for the linked article, not Thom’s writeup):
There’s no ultimate result in evolution. AST itself would predict further forms, and perhaps computerized forms.
I’m trying to get better at this myself. Colloquially it is fine, but technically it should say “If the hypothesis is correct…” or “If the idea is correct…”. …Is that right?
Edited 2016-06-07 12:44 UTC
How about we say current/this consciousness is the current ultimate result of that evolutionary sequence?
“That evolutionary sequence” has had multiple results of which the ultimate (most impressive, not final) is current consciousness. Further evolution is certainly possible. (Super Sayan was the ultimate form of Sayan for a while, but not the final ultimate form
)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory
Don’t know about you, but it’s pretty clear from the context we’re talking about science.
Thanks for pointing me to the scientific theory instead of regular theory. But just because the word theory is used in a scientific article/context doesn’t mean they are talking about a scientific theory here. Actually the “and that has yet to be proven” basically says “it is just a theory for now, not a scientific theory yet”
We were given consciousness and set apart from animals by a higher power. This Darwinism is causing confusion. Why did humans develop a higher consciousness while monkeys didn’t? They weren’t created with it. It’s that simple. Humans were created to be special and set apart from other animals and to have dominion over everything created after them.
Meat is important for it’s protein content but that’s no excuse to load your plate. Proper portioning is key. Ideally it should be 25% meat, 25% rice/starches, and 50% vegetables. This is healthy and also reduces the volumes of farmed animals needed to fill the demand.
We don’t know to what degree other animals have consciousness. There’s no evidence pointing towards monkeys lacking the `higher consciousness` of humans.
By arguing with a hard core creationist (which the OP clearly is given their choice of wording), you’ve already lost. Don’t encourage them. It’s attention and validation they want, not intelligent discussion.
Edited 2016-06-07 15:19 UTC
You can’t use reason to change the mind of somebody that didn’t use reason to arrive at their opinion.
Edited 2016-06-07 17:04 UTC
My point exactly. The trouble I have with most of these people isn’t that they believe something I don’t, but rather they make no effort to even attempt to verify their conclusions. They believe it, that’s enough and if you don’t, so they say, the proof is on you. I say the burden of proof falls on the person making the assertion. If someone’s going to tell me that humans were created by a higher power, they’d better be ready to offer genuine evidence, and evidence of the scientific variety not a book or set of books with no provenance other than the word of some long dead powerful figure.
That is why it’s called a believe system or religion.
There is no evidence pointing towards monkeys having the “higher consciousness” either….Humans are the only “animals” with this “higher consciousness” my friend. Evolution can only explain so much and no more.
Alien, or Abrahamic?
I reject your premise on the basis that it lacks any proof whatsoever and that claims must be proven (or failed to be falsified while still being falsifiable) before being accepted.
Alas, insert coin and try again.
The same goes for origins of life from naturalistic processes. We have never observed abiogenesis in a lab. Further, even if we did, that would at most proved it could happen, not that it did happen.
While modern evolutionists may not be concerned with origins of life, without life, there could be no evolution. So, building evolution w/o understanding our origins is like building a skyscraper w/o a foundation.
So, determining origins requires a degree of faith. Not necessarily a “blind faith”, but an educated faith based on available evidences. We create one or more models, just like for any scientific theory, and the model that best fits the data should be accepted, unless and until evidence points more towards another model.
The model that best fits the evidence is a creator, God, who did not use macro-evolution, but created everything in six 24-hour periods. The degree of precision required for life on Earth is so stringent, a reasonable person would not conclude it occurred by mere chance or accident. Nor, would any reasonable person then state that there’s no God, but that aliens planted life here. (1) Because we have no evidence of aliens doing so. (2) Because that only shows the origins of life on Earth, not in the universe (or multiverse, however you want to look at it).
Creationists do no lack evidence. They just have their evidence constantly ridiculed and ignored. And quite often, in my own discussions, I find it is by those who are unaware of the specifics of the evidence, and have no desire to educate themselves. For instance, http://www.apologeticspress.org, gives many evidences, both for the existence of God and for reasons to doubt evolution and the big bang. And lest someone think it’s just some Bible-thumping preachers writing a personal blog and making up stuff: the articles have bibliographies pointing to the scientific literature backing their statements, so you can look it up yourself instead of summarily dismissing it.
Uh huh. But I think your so-called God forgot about the dinosaurs. Did you attend Liberty Baptist College or something?
I’m finding it hard to let you convince me of your point of view, but I’m giving it a try. Beware, though, that I will not fall for dogma or false truth. I think the truth I accept is the truth that fits the reality the best, and if another truth is found that fits the reality even better, then that original truth must be discarded and replaced. This last bit is what religion lacks: it does not accept the premise that it might be wrong, it just clings and clings trying to keep itself alive and in power. That’s the wrong way.
A site with “apologetics” in the name doesn’t exactly inspire confidence — correct, accurate claims that are positively-indicated by evidence don’t need apologetics/ists.
Since you didn’t bother linking to any specific articles to backup any of your individual claims, tell you what: how about you save us all some time and answer me one question. Are there ANY claims on the site you linked that haven’t already been refuted in numerous places – E.g. the “Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism” series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmQZ4f9f_Yw)?
Then do you reject the claim that life began through abiogenesis?
We have never seen it in experiments. And even if we did, at most, that shows it could occur, not that it did occur. I.e., we never saw the alleged event, so it’s mere speculation that it has occurred.
And if so, how did life begin? Either it was God or it was naturalistic processes*.
* Even the claim of aliens planting life on Earth fails to fully answer the question. It would only explain origins of life on Earth, not life in general. You’d end up needing to know how life started for the aliens. You could say a 2nd set of aliens planted life for the first set of aliens, but then you’re just moving the problem farther and farther back, not answering the original question.
I’d rather have a model with 1000’s of pieces of evidence pointing in its direction, even if there’s no conclusive proof, than one that’s speculative and masquerading as scientific. Namely, the model of creationism. Apologetics Press is a good site to check for many of those evidences. It has bibliographies for all of its articles. Many, if not most, of those bibliographical references pointing to reputable scientific journals and publications.
Hey, midnight cowboy: If punching accept the punchings.
Arrogant Bullies not welcomed here.
Binary Minds…
… the knowledge of being?
I know that “I am”, all of us do. And IMHO that knowledge is beyond the human brain. It doesn’t require any sensory input, any thought process to know that one is.
As for the “outside of the universe” and “before the big bang”… interesting questions.
I’d say that everything alive, from the tiniest microbe onward, has at least some knowledge of being and consciousness doesn’t enter into that. They may not be able to think about what they are, but they do know that they exist on some level. If not, why try to continue and survive at all?
Bollocks. Without any sensory input, you wouldn’t know speech, you’d have no inner monologue, you’d have no way of organising your thought stream into words.
It’s a very common error to underestimate – or not even consider at all – the impact language has on our sense of self and consciousness. Without any sensory input – without ever having had sensory input – you wouldn’t be able to develop an inner monologue, no way to articulate or experience awareness, put it into “words”, and actively “think” about it.
Language is probably one of the biggest contributing factors to humans developing what we call “consciousness” – if not the biggest factor.
I don’t get it, Thom.
To me, if a person, an animal or a plant suffers (by way of example), it’s because there’s consciousness. Machines don’t suffer (for now, at least!); living organisms do.
What does language or speech have to do with it?
In any case, I think there’s a big difference between consciousness and self-awareness.
You asked about the knowledge of being; not the wider concept of consciousness. The two things are not the same.
My dog is a conscious been. Is She able to acknowledge that fact, as an idea? There it is the edge of the research, right now.
Can’t ask Her. But can research if She makes use of that idea, as a tool.
My farther memories are about that OVERWHELMING of the senses, of the present tense.
These continuously-evolving ‘signal-processing’ models detach conscience from identity. Which is [an approach]very Oriental [and Old], in its philosophy.
[quote]The theory suggests that consciousness arises as a solution to one of the most fundamental problems facing any nervous system: Too much information constantly flows in to be fully processed. [/quote]
Interesting, but who’s to say that consciousness (as a phenomenon) has processing limits ? You need to prove the limits before making claims about the subjects application.
Edited 2016-06-07 15:02 UTC
Think of the tools a new carpenter aficionado sets or build at disposition. Decades later, mastering his craft, how would his shop look like?
Full of wood chips?
Good one, Gargyle
Its an interesting question, that deserves an interesting discussion. Through no one’s fault at all, I don’t think this is where it will be had.
Very AI, future IT related.
Every passing decade will be harder to talk about our constructed environments, without -at the same time- talking about ourselves.
This is more of a “hypothesis” or conjecture than a “theory,” No? The article seemed very speculative.
“Ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, evolution has been the grand unifying theory of biology.” Which he then scoffed at on his deathbed… If you are going to talk about evolution you may as well leave out Darwin since he didn’t even believe in it.
You’ll find that most evolutionists are decidedly religious in their belief of it. Even to the point of persecuting non believers… (especially college professors…) So, I’m just gonna keep it simple and believe that an omnipotent being,God namely Jesus in my case, created life, and I’ll eat me some guilt free pork while I’m at it too, because naturally I’m at the top of the food chain…
It is also noteworthy that many of greatest minds of the past 100 years were not evolutionists, also not being an evolutionist doesn’t mean a person doesn’t believe mutation, or even that natural selection is impossible just that it isn’t the origin of species.
Evolution rides on the same political wave as climate change… while the real science that will improve the world is done elsewhere.
And your proof of this God hypothesis of yours?
P.S. I’m in no way saying the evolutionists are right, 100%. I do think though, that they are on the right track in attempting to figure things out rather than just “keeping it simple” and believing in religions that are clearly self-contradictory nonsense. At least they’re trying.
Edited 2016-06-07 18:09 UTC
I disagree, and that I think is one of the most important freedoms we have. In addition to this scientifically it is of no significant consequence if you and I disagree on this matter!
Which is what really irks me when evolutionists make out like it matters what you believe. Trying to convert me to their “religion” which really doesn’t bother me so much except when people get heavy handed about it. Science is science in the end cold hard facts… believe in evolution or not doesn’t really hinder science in any way. If anything close mindedness hinders science more than anything…
Edited 2016-06-07 18:35 UTC
But nobody “believes” in evolution, just as much as nobody “believes” in gravity. It just is. We know evolution is a thing because humans have been exploiting it since time immemorial – everything you eat, every natural material you build with, and so on, has been selectively “evolved” (i.e., bred) by humans to combine the best traits. Once we got the knowledge of genetics, DNA, and all that stuff, we could even selectively “evolve” down to the lowest levels. Pretty sure you’ll have somebody in your circle of family and friends who owe their life to some gene-related therapy… An evolution-related therapy.
Not believing in evolution is like not believing in gravity. It just makes no sense.
But it doesn’t have to make sense. Religious people are able to selectively shut their brains off, and everyone gives them a free pass for it because well, hey, it’s what they believe. Personally, as far as I’m concerned, they can believe whatever self-contradictory nonsense they want. It’s when they try to force the rest of us into it that I get pissed off.
To be fair, I’m sure they said the same thing about Zeus in ancient times. There’s a lot more evidence for evolution though.
“It just is” That’s what you believe, I certainly don’t believe that. It’s nothing like gravity other than nobody has really figured out gravity thoroughly yet.
If you couldn’t get along and work with me in a scientific environment not dealing with the origin of species… then the problem is on your end not mine.
Also breeding is not natural selection… its unnatural and if anything it’s semi-intelligent design. When you have engineered genes in a GMO etc… they don’t call them designer genes for nothing.
Edited 2016-06-07 20:14 UTC
So your counter-argument, to repudiate evolution, is a fabricated myth (that Darwin denied evolution on his deathbed). Fascinating lack of self awareness.
A new thinkering avenue. Little more than hardly deforested, gravel path.
Oops! Misplaced. should anchor at:
“This is more of a “hypothesis” or conjecture…”
You may be in denial that there isn’t any sign that may prove the existence of a higher power, but you may not be in denial that the current climate is changing for the worst and for the sake of our preservation we should try and do something about it.
Edited 2016-06-09 07:22 UTC
Science already answered this decades ago – your conscious is not interrupted, it’s ALTERED. Even if you aren’t aware or remember it later, you still have a conscious mind working in a different state than normal. We even have different names for those different states of consciousness. We have measured/monitored those states with ever-better equipment. So you simply cannot equate sleeping or being unconscious (due to injury or anesthesia) to death. Death is generally now even defined as a lack of any of those measured states of consciousness.
Really in need of reboot at critical moments. 2 o 3 times a week, of lately
Full Stop, Blank, Reassess.
//Personally, I’m one of those insufferable people who ascribes the entire concept of consciousness to the specific arrangement of neurons and related tissue in our brain and wider nervous system…//
That’s not insufferable. That’s metaphysical naturalism. That’s a belief system like any other, no different than a religious belief system — and not scientific in any way.
As for myself, I’d rather not get attached to any belief systems. The book on consciousness is still wide open. The article quoted is interesting, but pure speculation.
Edited 2016-06-09 02:30 UTC
It’s the ultimate scientific way of looking at it. The simplest, most logical explanation until we arrive at something better. It requires no magic, special bearded white cloud men, arrangements of words that make them have magical powers, or whatever other non-scientific nonsense.
//It’s the ultimate scientific way of looking at it.//
No it’s not. Science is a methodology, not a springboard from which one can make assertions without evidence (though that’s what individuals do every day whilst calling their beliefs “scientific”). That’s metaphysical naturalism and it’s a belief system.
The proper “scientific way” of looking at it is methodological naturalism; and that requires us to say that we first have to establish what consciousness is before we can establish how the brain might have created it.
All I’m saying is, someone like Thom is welcome to express their beliefs (as well as those who wrote the article) but they don’t get to drape themselves in the mantel of “Science”. They’re expressing beliefs as to the origination of consciousness. Who knows, they may be right; and they may not be.
Edited 2016-06-09 12:27 UTC
http://hirocker.com/consciousness/on-human-consciousness.html