From: swf@teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: what is consciousness for?
Date: 19 Aug 92 21:26:12 GMT
Reply-To: swf@tdat.teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: NCR Teradata Database Business Unit

In article <1992Aug18.181021.14352@sequent.com> bfish@sequent.com (Brett Fishburne) writes:
|>that it can be used as an explanation of consciousness.  Certainly you
|                                                          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
|>need consciousness for culture to work.  
| ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
|
|I'm not sure if that is true.  Would ants be considered to have culture or
|am I confusing culture with society?

No, and yes.

Really, the basic usage of the word 'culture' is to refer to *learned*
comonality of behavior.  Ants show genetic preprogrammed behavior, that just
happens to be similar in certain superficial respects to certain parts of
human social behavior.

|>But in my view, consciousness
|>of some degree exists in many other animals (perhaps all mammals, for
|>example), and culture has little significance to most of these.  It
|>stretches credulity to suggest that the blind mechanisms of evolution
|>had so much forsight as to create something for purposes that would
|>eventually show up with the appearance of homo sapiens.
|
|I have been ruffled by these arguments to the "forsight" of evolution.  Is
|it possible that conscious evolved and had no immediate effect (neither good
|or bad) so it was kept around (sort of like the appendix these days) and it
|turned out to have an effect as culture developed so that those with
|consciousness survived and those without didn't?  My point is that I'm not
|willing to believe that evolution needed "forsight" for things to work.

Quite true.  This is aproximately a standard mechanism for evolution.
It is often called by the rather misleading term 'pre-adaptation'.
(The main quibble is that that you are treating both consciousness and
culture as simple binary characters, when they are both in fact gradational
characters - so what you get is a little consciousness occuring for no
particular reason, allowing a little bit of culture to develope, which
tends to enahnce the value of consciousness, and selecting for improved
levels of consciousness, allowing more culture, ...).

P.S. some other mammals *do* have culture.  It has been shown to be of
some considerable importance in chimpanzees, and most anthropoid primates
(monkeys and apes) show some degree of cultural behavior (there is even
a suggestion that the unusual mating/social structure of the Hamadryas
Baboon is mainly cultural).

|A side issue on the evolution argument.  Isn't it reasonable to believe that
|some things which are considered essential for modern intellectual development
|could have "evolved" at a time when they were not actually useful, been
|discarded, and the "re-evolved" in a time when they were an advantage.

I am not entirely sure just what you mean here.  No complex system or structure
can possibly evolve without *some* use.  But individual, *simple* features
may well occur more or less at random (*maybe*).  Culture is a very complex
phenomenon, and could not exist without some use.


-- 
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  or
Stanley.Friesen@ElSegundoCA.ncr.com
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy