[MD] Consciousness a la Platt

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Chris]
I don't know If you'll agree with me, but from where I'm sitting it 
seems plausible that consciousness the way it is identified (witch is 
rather badly) now had to develop from the social level and into the 
intellectual level.

[Arlo]
That's the way I see it. I think, as I've mentioned a bit ago, that 
Tomasello's work on "The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition" ties 
directly into the MOQ. His central premise is that at some point in 
the timeline the evolving neurobiology of primates (biologic level) 
attained a degree of complexity that beget an unintended consequence 
(meaning neurobiological evolution was not moving towards this 
directly nor purposefully) of allowing primates to have "shared 
attention" (what he points to as the beginning point for social 
symbolic activity). As the complexity and sophistication of the 
primates' symbol use evolved (evolution occurring because the 
collective consciousess formed by shared social activity would be 
added to and modified over time by primates who assimilate this), 
eventually self-reflective symbols became involved (Hofstadter's work 
here is enlightening) and what we think of as "modern consciousness" 
appears. (I hold that the intellectual level itself is the level of 
symbolic self-reflection, when humans turned from using their symbols 
to represent experience and considered them as real "things in themselves").

To rephrase this along the lines of the questions that Ham and Platt 
are incapable of addressing.

What changed between early primates without consciousness and humans 
with consciousness is... a level of neuro-biological complexity 
brought about by DNA-driven biological evolution that spawned the 
unintended consequence of allowing shared attention and hence the 
emergence of social activity.

The mechanism by which consciousness evolves is.... the collective 
consciousness (the "mythos"), which evolves over time as new 
generations and new individuals assimilate it and add to it and 
modify it. Successive generations of primates assimilated a greater 
and more complex collective consciousness than their forefathers and 
foremothers, and their activity moved it further still.

And to restate, from here the growing complexity of the social level 
(shared symbolic activity) hit a level of complexity where it was 
able to become self-reflective (the experiential descriptor "blue" 
went from being a modifier in shared activity to a "thing in itself", 
"what is blueness?"). The "self" is one such self-referential loop.

[Chris]
Something like that anyway. I'll need to look this over more 
carefully I feel. But What do you say?

[Arlo]
I'd say we are on the same page, at least mostly. Agree?