Our Kind of Looking Ahead: Higher Intellectual Functions (5th of 5)
Channel: William H. Calvin
Date: 2017-03-11

Consciousness is not just attention and awareness. It is our mental life, that planning ahead, attempts at rationality and logic, enjoyment of harmony, that eureka each time we discover some underlying pattern. The higher intellectual functions all add structure to their beginning forms shared with apes, in much the same way as short sentences are extended using syntax. They all need quality improvements, quickly converting incoherent drafts into a coherent plan before acting on them.