21–30 of 91 posts
If you find this sort of thing interesting, I highly recommend HBO's Westworld. It's really well done and thoroughly thought provoking.
But almost all pschological educated people I talked to found it too muddy.
Wacky and entertaining idea. The theory rests on another idea that many people assume is obviously true without ever thinking twice. It's the notion that verbal thought and verbal thinking is required and fundamental part of consciousness and self awareness. When I started to read about the philosophy of consciousness, it became obvious that most people experience their own consciousness differently than I do. Their…
Any useful theory of consciousness has to be able to explain animal consciousness too. Language is really the only differentiator between us and other primates, cognitively. (naturally it's a powerful difference) Primates far and away clear the bar for sentience, we know enough about dogs and cats to grudgingly accept them into the fold too. Plenty of birds are extremely intelligent and social as well.
Language is really the only differentiator between us and other primates, cognitively I don't agree. Many other types of animals have rudimentary languages, but I wouldn't dispute the sophistication of human language towers above all others, that in itself rests (along with other uniquely sophisticated behavioural endowments) upon what really differentiates us which is the capacity for imagination and abstract though…
Wacky and entertaining idea. The theory rests on another idea that many people assume is obviously true without ever thinking twice. It's the notion that verbal thought and verbal thinking is required and fundamental part of consciousness and self awareness. When I started to read about the philosophy of consciousness, it became obvious that most people experience their own consciousness differently than I do. Their…
This Temple Grandin bit is great!
Wacky and entertaining idea. The theory rests on another idea that many people assume is obviously true without ever thinking twice. It's the notion that verbal thought and verbal thinking is required and fundamental part of consciousness and self awareness. When I started to read about the philosophy of consciousness, it became obvious that most people experience their own consciousness differently than I do. Their…
> I have always had trouble understanding why people link verbal thinking and consciousness I came across the same conundrum when I was studying psychology. It all came down to the medium becoming the message. Language is the prime means through which we convey experience. Of course there are other means visual, spacial but when you're "studying consciousness" you're typically reading books. Serious treatise in the a…
Content of our consciousness seems to be based on sensory input and sensor fusion. Thinking is running simulated sequences and scenarios in our head. Different people use different sensory content more than others. I wouldn't be surprised if some people use feelings or motor imaginary more than others.
We have visuospatial ability, audioverbal perception and motor imagery/proprioception. Interoceptive senses seem to relate feelings somehow. If you really drill and analyze what if feels to love, hate or fear. The feeling is related to our internal senses.
I've always wondered, do we actually know this for sure? What's the evidence? Just by introspection, it is so hard for me to imagine being in a state of mind where I didn't believe that if I dropped a rock off a cliff twice, under similar conditions, it would do pretty much the same thing the second time. Or that if I did it over and over again, I would start to see patterns that I could rely on for later. This feels as hard-wired as just about anything in my mind.
To me, it makes more sense to think that humans have always thought the same way, and these days we just have better tools and have learned to refine the cognitive abilities that are wired into us. But I'm really interested to hear the case for the other side.
Wacky and entertaining idea. The theory rests on another idea that many people assume is obviously true without ever thinking twice. It's the notion that verbal thought and verbal thinking is required and fundamental part of consciousness and self awareness. When I started to read about the philosophy of consciousness, it became obvious that most people experience their own consciousness differently than I do. Their…
> I have always had trouble understanding why people link verbal thinking and consciousness I came across the same conundrum when I was studying psychology. It all came down to the medium becoming the message. Language is the prime means through which we convey experience. Of course there are other means visual, spacial but when you're "studying consciousness" you're typically reading books. Serious treatise in the a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure how important "langauge" is for cognition. I think it is clear that the cognitive facilities that, in humans, we attribute to language, are a significant part of human cognition. However, when we test for language in other animals, we do not test for these underlying cognitive abilities. Rather, rather, we test for the animals ability to express these facilities through some communication system with oth…
> I'm not sure how important "langauge" is for cognition. It's not. That's why I said that any good theory is going to have to account for all the sentience in the world that doesn't talk to each other.
Secondly, my point is that other animals may still have "language", but just without the small components necessary for communication. If this were true, then language could still be the explanation for consciousness.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And it's really hard to verify what people heard in the past. “Our kings, presidents, judges, and officers begin their tenures with oaths to the now-silent deities, taken upon the writings of those who have last heard them.” How do we know that they weren't just doing poetry or fiction, or creating religion to control the masses?
Nietzsche wrote at length about the "death of god," which was his way of symbolizing the unseating of god from society's abstract throne, and the dangerous power vacuum that blood would be shed to re-fill. You can't walk three feet through the past couple centuries before finding some text discussing, cheering on or mourning the transition from a society where god is generally assumed to be behind things to one where…
Documented where?
The Sapiens book makes a similar assertion, that something changed in the brain about 10000 years ago, when agriculture was invented.
Before that people hunted and gathered for 200k years with little progress and suddenly there was an explosion.