[extropy-chat] Qualia Bet

[gts]

On Fri, 09 Dec 2005 12:36:14 -0500, Damien Broderick  
<thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:

> Basic? Insufficiently elegant? How do you feel about vision? Digestion?

I think understanding consciousness is to understanding cognition like  
understanding osmosis is to understanding digestion.

or

I think understanding consciousness is to understanding cognition like  
understanding e=mc^2 is to understanding the blueprint of nuclear weapon.

Although human cognition and psychology are complex subjects, I think  
something relatively simple happened along the path of human evolution  
that enabled with us with consciousness (or what I prefer to describe as  
awareness of our awareness, or self-consciousness). It was a "discovery"  
of evolution, a pivotal event something like and probably concurrent with  
the discovery of tools or symbols. Probably the first symbols were "self"  
and "not-self".

This is not to say I think it happened without some transitional period,  
during which humans were only dimly aware of themselves at some pre-verbal  
level. I don't imagine Fred Flinstone's car with a "My Mother Was A  
Mindless Zombie" bumper-sticker.

> Far too basic to be complicated by all those rods and cones and  
> preprocessors and enzymes and gut-roiling and all? Bleh?

Those are just the details. :)

-gts