Consciousness

Early humans a little more intelligent than the others figured out they could easily control the group with superstition. Physical symbols only reinforce the case for nonsense, The history of religion is the history of control.

Development of Human Consciousness as We Know It

Here’s a pretty good presentation from a PhD student, imo. She doesn’t go deep into religion, but it seems like a good start, and it’s relevant to our consciousness. (The audio’s a bit irritating at first, but improves later.)

Genevieve Von Petzinger

The bulk of any language evolves and operates, if not on a full two-way street, at least with a transmitter and a comprehending receiver, e.g. in the case of a poisonous plant or animal advertising itself in a colorfully visual way and a predator’s evolved behavior to ignore it and/or keep its distance.  Or when two furry animals fluff up to…[Read more]

When tragedy strikes a family of dogs…do you think the other dogs offer their “thoughts and prayers”?

Dogs are cooperative breeders like humans are.  So, a human baby will look around at all the people in the vicinity, as if soliciting care, and is normally cared for by multiple people.  In contrast, an ape or monkey baby clings tight to its mother for the first six months or so of its life.

I was reasonably conscious of having posted it before but it is worth another look 🙂 I spent two full days at the Schrodinger lectures.  Time and money well spent.

Did you get to see the book link in today’s school?

Thanks to Reg (in 10NOV’19 Sunday School) for a video entitled Christof Koch: The Future of Consciousness – Schrödinger at 75: The Future of Biology

Scientists Demonstrate Direct Brain-to-Brain Communication in Humans
Link to Scientific American article

Excerpts:

[…] In a new study, technology replaces language as a means of communicating by directly linking the activity of human brains.

[…] A magnetic pulse was delivered to the receiver using a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)…

[Read more]

Unseen wrote:

Can androids dream of electric sheep?

@Unseen, I apologize for my first, rambling response to your post, and/so following is more to the point. [PopeBeanie edit: I moved that post out of this topic because I think it was distractingly too wordy.]

That is a really important question, and I think that since we don’t know if/how we’ll…[Read more]

I bought 2 tickets before I finished reading that list!!  Took 2 days of work to attend 🙂 Got a meet and greet with Dan Dennett.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

List of speakers here with several talks that are relevant (or just interesting). 5 Nobel Laureates among them.

That is an awesome and challenging list! I’ll first see what I can find and share having to do with specialized areas of the brain.

So we can study “development” of consciousness at the individual level prenatally and when one is growing up and growing old, over thousands of years of human cultural evolution, at the human and primate species level genetically, or over millions of years of mammalian and other animal evolution.

[edited: I moved the mention here about evolution…[Read more]