Actually, your response is perfect.

I only brought it up as a possible aid to understanding what Jaynes is trying to express by intelligent action without consciousness.

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"Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits." - Satchel Paige

That sounds a good deal like qigongfu, but what are you linking to?


The same could be said about learning to drive on the Road. It's about as difficult as cooking a small fish.




Not too stretch this too thin, but sometimes just by imitation.

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"Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits." - Satchel Paige

There must be something wrong with my browser or connection. I still don't see a link to this entry (which itself is a redirection from this Wikipedia article) to click on in any of the above messages.

Be that as it may, several other key ideas from Laozi are the notions of "returning to the root" (using the cycle of seasonal sap flow as a metaphor for fajing and shijing) and "returning to the state of the uncarved [block of] wood". Is Jaynes once again setting us up to be more favorably disposed to regard evidence of a "lost" mental state, or have I read too much into it?

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"Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits." - Satchel Paige

@ leonAzul:

You are correct, I did forget to provide the link. No excuses. I thought I had posted it, but did not. It was supposed to be a link to TFD on wu wei.

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/wu+wei

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A great many people will think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. ~ William James ~

I agree. So far he has only shown that is possible for people to behave rationally without full consciousness in the sense being discussed.

I'm still waiting for that "Shaka, when the walls fell" moment.

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"Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits." - Satchel Paige

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Epiphileon:
This is a subjective argument, and of course that is how it seems to you, because you can only be aware of, what you are aware of, but if you take into account the amount of brain it takes to produce intelligence, personality, language, and all the other tasks necessary to maintaining a mentality, let alone a body in operational condition, you will quickly run out of capacity. Besides that access any modern text on the anatomy and physiology of the brain, and you will find, maps of brain function that have been empirically determined that disallow 60% or more devoted to image production.

I did not know my brain could run out of capacity. Hmmm. Ok, I’m teasing. However:
I wonder if the confusion is in the definition of “image production”. I do not use the idea of images or imaging to refer to visual structures of the eyes, optic nerves and occipital region of the brain exclusively. I am referring to the whole of thought, or consciousness as it behaves in forming visual images in the imagination creating “intelligence, personality, language and all the other tasks necessary to maintaining a mentality”.

It is subjective, and that was my point. It is the subjective experience of “visualization” that I believe made humans so different from every other creature. We call it imagination, and it was this imagination that conferred onto us a special adaptive edge for survival, in my opinion, without which we likely would not have survived at all. It doesn’t matter how much, exactly, the percentage that our brain uses, simply that it “seems” to be the majority of our thought processes

Epiphileon:
I don't consider the fundamental definition of intelligence to be an opinion, it is that function of a nervous system that causes an organism to modify its behavior on the basis of experience.

So if a bear cub gets a nose full of quills from a porcupine and afterwards alters its behavior to avoid porcupines, is that intelligence? I would call it memory, but that’s just me.

Epiphileon:
Intelligence has been evolving, as I said, for hundreds of millions of years, the difference in human intelligence from that of other species is one of complexity, one can not separate human intelligence from its evolutionary history. The advent of consciousness did lead, to an explosion in the application of, and most likely a more rapid development of intelligence, but I would submit that explosion happened relatively recently in our evolution. Homo Erectus was approximately 2.5 million years ago, and already a tool user. Do you think H. Erectus was conscious?

I do not know for certain if H. Erectus was conscious, but if he was using tools, I would give him the benefit of the doubt and suspect that he did, indeed, possess something, perhaps the rudimentary form of consciousness; if nothing more than carrying stones or large sticks to throw at predators. I can’t envision him simply wandering around completely unprotected. And if he had the ability to use weapons such as these for protection, I would think he is beyond simple memory or instinct.

Epiphileon:
My point is that you are underestimating intelligence, and not framing your argument within what we know of the evolutionary development of brains. Intelligence predates consciousness absolutely, this does not mean that the advent of consciousness did not have a profound effect on the application of it. Consider the change in the rate at which we both acquired, and applied, knowledge over the last few thousand years. The rate is exponential, and such change could not be supported, unless the underlying cognitive abilities were already there. Consciousness does not build brain structure, it facilitates it, even improves it, may even lead to the selection of new connectivity, but that selection occurs on existent structure.

Again it seems to come down to the definition of intelligence. I agree that consciousness facilitates, or even improves brain structure and that it occurs on existent structure. I speculate that is was an accretion of neurons as the brain size increased or perhaps a mutation in the genes, but it is only that, speculation.

Epiphileon:
I did not mean to infer that social structure in its self has any effect on the evolution of intelligence whatsoever; however, intelligence would certainly have an effect on what type of social structures could be established. My reference to the beginning of the evolution of social structure with insects, was to point out that social structure can be an evolutionary development, and produced by biological evolution, once social structure does arise, it becomes its own set of selective pressures giving rise to co-evolutionary processes, that can indeed build extremely complex social systems.
In reference to the extinction issue, there was a long period of time in our evolutionary development when we were post arboreal, but non-weaponized, how did we survive that?

I would think that social structure would have the tendency to inhibit rather than increase development. As humans need to belong to a group for safety and protection, they would tend to remain in collective group think rather than stand out from it.

It seems humans attempted to continue the tribal mode of living arrangement well into a time when it became rather unwieldy. Whole nations followed kings and queens continuing the tribal pattern. At some point, however, as these became ever larger, and the unwieldiness grew, new thought patterns began to emerge. But I digress.

As to the idea we spent a great deal of time post arboreal but non-weaponized, I questioned whether or not that could be so. As I said earlier, I cannot see how humanity could have survived with no defenses. I cannot answer that question, if it is true, but because I doubt the veracity of that, I find it difficult to believe. I’ll attempt to do some research on that. Are you simply asserting this, or have you hard evidence of it?

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A great many people will think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. ~ William James ~

We can disagree whether cleverness equals consciousness. Yet as Jaynes has presented it, we cannot dismiss out of hand that reason and language can exist without the "handle onto it" that consciousness provides.

I'm curious. What leads you to believe that the ability to make tools didn't arise before they left the forest?

There is no doubt that the open savannah was a severe testing ground for mankind, yet there is ample evidence that the genus Homo had other less stressful environments available for many thousands of years in which to survive and develop.

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"Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits." - Satchel Paige

We can disagree about cleverness and consciousness, but language without consciousness is, to my mind, walking without legs. It just does not seem possible to me.

Why can we not dismiss the idea language without consciousness? Jaynes has offered no reasonable or plausible method by which humans could invent language without the capacity for abstract thought or imagination. If he can present some evidence of it, I'll reconsider my position, but so far he hasn't. So I dismiss it.

As to your second point, I don't know that tool-making arose before leaving the forest. If it did, then that would further reinforce my belief that, at the least, a primitive awareness or consciousness developed before well before civilization!

It may be that the evolutionary development of awareness/consciousness gave rise to imagining life "out there" on the savannahs, or perhaps wonder at what may lie on the other side.

Something certainly impelled early humans to leave the arboreal world, travel across savannahs, and spread out of Africa. It may have been drought, food supply shortages, the wanderlust of curiosity, or a combination of these and more. But I do not believe that for the next one million years, humans were automatons, without conscious thought.

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A great many people will think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. ~ William James ~

I will have to look into this further as well, I got lazy and went on what I remembered from studies that are now over 20 years old. What I learned then was that Australopithecus afarenis (lucy) was non-arboreal, it is now a matter of debate whether this was entirely accurate, and it may have been only part time bipedal, but still maintained arboreal ability, and therefore a means of escape from most predators. There is however still a huge amount of time between Lucy and effective weapons, I will look into this some more, but probably not till next week.

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Hope all goes well with your operation Epi. 2 to 5 days, must be fairly major as we get kicked out ASP. I had double hernia op 2 years ago and went home next day. Must have been motivated by the sight/thought/smell of hospital food.

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RULES ARE FOR THE OBEYENCE OF FOOLS AND FOR THE GUIDENCE OF WISE MEN

Epiphileon:

Hope all goes well for you at the hospital.

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A great many people will think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. ~ William James ~

Quote:
What Consciousness Is Not
First, consciousness is not all of mentality.


Who said it had to be? That is not the question.


Suppose you asked a flashlight in a
completely dark room to turn itself on and to look around and see if there was any light — the
flashlight as it looked around would of course see light everywhere and come to the conclusion
that the room was brilliantly lit when in fact it was mostly just the opposite.

This is more the question. Did the people of earlier civilizations have "flashlights"? Jaynes says no; that they were mere automatons without volition until a "voice" told them what to do. Each person hearing his/her own "voice", yet able to build, invent, and create whole civilizations with no conscious thought.

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A great many people will think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. ~ William James ~

To venture a bit outside the text, I could also entertain the thesis that, given sufficient similarity in brain structures, the "voices" are likely to converge on similar values and imperatives that are more or less harmonious.

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"Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits." - Satchel Paige

Perhaps this extract from the above quote addresses the question more directly:

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"Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits." - Satchel Paige

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Far too much unthinking surmising going on here, It is and has come about quite simply because we as human beings for whatever reason, (not religious) developed the 'power to reason' No other creature has this and I suggest 'never will'. To many it is a treasure but to many a curse.

If I understand this correctly, Jaynes has here stated what he has been hinting at all along: each side of the brain has an analogous area that verbalizes mental activity; the left side then expresses this as overt action, the right side serves to present the verbalization internally, specifically to the left side itself.

Does this seem a reasonable paraphrase of this hypothesis as Jaynes presents it?

I this is so, then we should expect to observe behavior which this explains, such as the reported experience of voices of unidentified origin that express commands to action, as well as an underlying neurological structure to facilitate such a claim of brain function.

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"Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits." - Satchel Paige