Nicholas Humphrey

=== ns as conjuring trick ===
http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Talk/talk.origins/2008-01/msg09548.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/science/04edgehed.html?pagewanted=2...
Nicholas Humphrey
Psychologist, London School of Economics; author,"The Mind Made Flesh"
"...I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed
to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable
mystery. Who is the conjuror and why is s/he doing it? The conjuror is
natural selection, and the purpose has been to bolster human self-
confidence and self-importance - so as to increase the value we each
place on our own and others' lives...."
Which means we shouldn't believe a word Humphrey says because he
believes his language is "conjuring trick". The statement itself was
made by his consciousness which means that the statement itself is a
"conjuring trick" and he therefore himself is a conjuring trick. 
These are known as self-defeating statements. Gould
made the same mistake saying that the mind "consists of illusions",
which means that Gould believed his mind consisted of illusions and
thus we shouldn't believe a word he said. In addition the statement
itself was an "illusion" because he formulated it with his mind!
What Darwin said about NS:
".....I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if
useful, is preserved, by the term natural selection, in order to mark
its relation to man's power of selection. But the expression often
used by Mr. Herbert Spencer, of the Survival of the Fittest, is more
accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient. We have seen that man
by selection can certainly produce great results, and can adapt
organic beings to his own uses, through the accumulation of slight but
useful variations, given to him by the hand of Nature. But Natural
Selection, we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for
action, and is as immeasurably superior to man's feeble efforts, as
the works of Nature are to those of Art....."
What one notices about this NS business is that NS in and of itself is
invoked as the actual explanation for what we observe. No, NS can only
be the label for the mechanism, the actual process responsible for the
universe and organisms. But what is this process that is labeled NS by
everybody? NS as a word term in and of itself can't be the actual
explanation just like the label "gravity" is not the actual
explanation for what the attraction between bodies are. This needs to
be defined elsewhere and will be independent of the actual label.