From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Subject: Re: what is consciousness for?
Organization: Northern Illinois University
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1992 19:50:26 GMT

In article <1992Aug18.181021.14352@sequent.com> bfish@sequent.com (Brett Fishburne) writes:
>In article <1992Aug18.161151.12316@mp.cs.niu.edu> rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
>>In article <Bt6K1u.Iyr@watdragon.uwaterloo.ca> cpshelle@logos.uwaterloo.ca (cameron shelley) writes:
>>>What does this have to do with consciousness?  Consciousness seems
>>>necessary to make culture work.  (In some sense, culture and genetics
>>
>>While I agree with this assessment of culture, I would hesitate to say
>>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?

I think 'society' might be a better term.  But even if the term 'culture'
is appropriate, ant 'culture' is very different from human culture, and
does not change over time in the same way.  That is, it is probably
behavior fixed in the genes rather than adopted by a community.  Whether
an ant has consciousness is a tricky question, although - based on
complete ignorance (mine, not the ants) - I assume not.  An equally
tricky question is whether the ant nest as a whole could have a community
consciousness without individual ants having consciousness.  I plead
ignorance to this too, although I do not consider the idea completely
preposterous.

>>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.

Good.  I've been trying to do some ruffling.

>                                                                        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?

I don't think your example of an appendix is a good one.  My biology is
a little rusty, but I understand that it did evolve for a purpose (of
value to our evolutionary ancestors), but has since become disused (at
least in our species).

But yes, something can evolve for no apparent reason, but if so it is
highly improbably that evolution will continue to develop it.  That is,
it will probably forever remain simple, unless it confers some selective
benefit which pushes it toward further development.  Perhaps every
biological development starts out as something with no apparent benefit.

Something can also evolve for one function, and later evolutionary
developments can convert it into a different functionality.

When we are talking about behavioral properties (consciousness,
intelligence, etc) rather than organs, there is also the possibility
they this behavior is really just a side effect of something else that
evolved for a good purpose.  But if so, you will understand it better
if you look at what really evolved, rather than studying only the side
effect.

>                                                  My point is that I'm not
>willing to believe that evolution needed "forsight" for things to work.

Anything that requires evolution to have forsight should be suspect.
I'm trying to insist on evolutionary plausibility as a way to avoid the
obvious homocentric biases.  There are many things that we may be looking
at the wrong way.  We may be taking side effects, and treating them as
important, while ignoring the underlying structures that create those
side effects.

Applying this to consciousness and culture, we would need to assume
something like one of the following as an explanation:

	Consciousness is really something terribly simple, almost trivial,
	which developed randomly, and had no benefit to any species
	until man started using it for cultural development.

	Consciousness developed for some other purpose, but has been
	converted by humans to cultural use.

	Consciousness developed for some purpose other than to support
	culture, and its usefulness for cultural evolution is a largely
	incidental side effect.

The third of these seems the most likely to me.  Actually, it is my
suspicion that consciousness is there to increase the speed of learning.
If so, the fact that there is much we are not conscious of is because
rapid learning is not particularly beneficial in some aspects of our
lives.

>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.  Does
>the fossil record support this hypothesis?

This sounds like a description of parallel evolution.  There is thought
to be no memory, as such, that would allow evolution to "learn from
experience".  But bats can develop wings as a somewhat parallel development
to bird wings.  A lot of parallel development is known, and sometimes
the similarities are remarkable.

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