h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

We met in SMOB (or Buttercup)'s forum about mental illness. You sound like a very wonderful, caring person. I am interested in absolutely the same things as you are. I live in South Africa and one of the things I do is to cultivate wild trees and other plants for the sake of conservation and teaching people about ecology. I am also very interested in religion! Please come and visit me at my space, or come and have a drink and a chat at the Utopia Cafébar:

http://www.h2g2.com/A465842

Anyways I will be around again to talk about stuff!

Lovely to meet you.. Uhmm... do you go by "unmentionable," "marauding" or "pillowcase?"
And thank you for your kind words. I was having a difficult day and you made me smile. I think that's a nice thing about the internet... suddenly we can reach across such vast distances and have a positive impact on someone. It does sound as if we have very similar interests. I noticed you have an interest in consciousness as well? Me too, among lots of others. I look forward to some fascinating conversations with you! Where shall we begin?
Cheers-
Ariel

You can call me Case! Or Willem, which is my real name. I have been having the most incredibly busy day in decades - now almost two in the morning right now and I'm still not finished! So I can't go into details right now! Consciousness and mental illness - that might be an interesting starting point, because there are many theories about consciousness that are considered "crazy" by the mainstream.

What are your ideas about the nature of human consciousness? Scientific, religious, whatever - any theory/suspicion/hunch you'd like to share?

If you like, you can look at my newest entry - the one I've been working on tonight:

http://www.h2g2.com/A507647

I would just love to do hundreds or thousands (or hundreds OF thousands) of entries like these! Do you like my illustrations?

Tomorrow or some other time I'll look at your page a bit more.

Well, Willem, you've gone straight to the heart of the matter. Thoughts on consciousness... I should really take time to write this down carefully but I can give you a bit of a preview of what I have been thinking about lately. My feeling (which is neither religious nor scientific) is that our consciousness is constantly evolving. Its been posited that our ancestors had a completely different conscious experience of the world than we do.. they had a "bicameral mind" in which they experienced the laws of their culture as literally hearing the voice of their gods when conflicts arose. Our consciousness has evolved so that this is no longer so. Yet, there are several scientific studies which have reported remarkable findings. In these cases, patients were undergoing surgery for a variety of reasons.. epilepsy or tumor for example. Surgeons were mapping the regions by electrically stimulating the brain and asking the patient to report their sensations.. this is generally done so that the surgeon doesn't excise the speech center, for example. (Oh.. As an aside, our brains don't feel pain, so aside from the oddity of having your brain open for all to see, the patients are relatively comfortable.) In any case..it has been reported that when a particular part of the frontal cortex of the human brain is electrically stimulated the individual reports that they are experiencing "god." I find this absolutely riveting... what are the implications of this? Is this a rudiment of the bicameral mind?
In any case I think this is a tremendous observation. The notion that our consciousness, how we experience the world and our subsequent understanding of our relationship to the divine, has evolved so dramatically begs the question of what comes next? What sort of selective pressures dictate the evolution of consciousness?
P.S. I don't mean to offend anyone's religious sensibilities.. I hope this doesn't trod on toes.

The evolution of consciousness ... what an exceedingly difficult subject! My thoughts - totally intuitive, but based on what I've learnt in many different ways: the evolution of consciousness will have two aspects: first, diversification; second, emergent phenomena.

I think we can safely say that the human conscious experience is currently the most diverse kind that exists on earth. That means the human mind, by virtue of having the structure that it has, is capable of having a greater variety of experiences than any other mind on the planet (yes, I do believe animals have minds). Also, phenomena emerge in the human mind that do not exist or have no counterparts in other organisms. Now there are emergent phenomena in other minds as well, and because of those emergent phenomena being different from ours we might have real problems understanding them. True three dimensional vision is such an emergent phenomenon and it occurs in dolphins and bats. For all we know there might be others.

Nevertheless I believe that the human mind has more potential for further evolution than any other minds on this planet. We have these emergent phenomena in our minds: 1) A sense of an individual self; 2) A sense of time going from the past to the future 3) An ability to understand things abstractly 4) An ability to manipulate our knowledge in creative ways 5) An ability to reflect on our selves and our own thinking 6) The ability to make intuitive leaps 7) The ability to develop intellectual and emotional values to serve as motivational forces in our lives 8) Spiritual abilities like the God-experience you refer to.

Maybe some animals also have some of these attributes, but I can think of no other species that might potentially have all of them.

This is not a complete list; I wouldn't pretend to be an expert on the human mind. Unfortunately it seems to me that human consciousness has been very little studied in and of itself. Consciousness has to be studied from the inside, subjectively, and is therefore not amenable to traditional scientific approaches. Consider again that God-experience. Can science describe the experience itself? Can science, by any means whatsoever, measure any qualitative aspect of the experience? This illustrates the difficulty of knowing anything concrete about the phenomenal aspects of consciousness, it's "What-it's-like-ness". Until we have models of consciousness that incorporate those aspects we do not have a scientific understanding of consciousness.

My hunch is that not all humans display all the qualities that the human mind is potentially capable of. My hunch is also that the human mind can still change by a huge amount without the brain needing to physically evolve at all. Just throw in two possible new developments: 1) Direct thought transmission from one mind to another, possibly with the help of electronics interfaced with the brain; 2) An extension of the average human lifespan to 500 years or more. These developments would enable individual minds to develop much faster and much further than is currently possible, and in such instances entirely new kinds of phenomena might emerge, and a new breed of human being might result, as different from us as we are from baboons.

I have a hunch as to a kind of emergent phenomenon we might expect: the group mind. There are already small signs of such a thing happening. A future scenario might be where a group mind consists of thousands or even millions of individuals whose brains are linked so intimately that they function together as a single mind. Every person might still have a sense of personal identity, but there will be a sense of a group identity that is even stronger. The group mind will be to an individual mind like a brain is to a neuron.

Can the human brain understand itself?
This is actually more than a rhetorical question. As you asked, can science actually study consciousness in a meaningful way?
Its very difficult to predict what path evolution will take. Things tend to remain the same unless there are either sudden selective pressures brought to bear that cull out certain genetic traits from a population, or certain traits are deemed desirable and are selected for in a population's breeding patterns. So its difficult to imagine what selective pressures might be brought to bear on human consciousness.
What does seem clear is that through experience and education we are changed culturally and as individuals. For example, is the facility with which the average 5 year old uses a computer a kind of evolution of consciousness or just a "skill?" There are some psychologists and philosophers who posit that there are such things as memes that act almost like knowledge viruses, and that the reason why the average 5 year old is so much better at using a computer than grandma and grandpa is because the computer meme has infected our species. This has also been offered to account for simultaneous discoveries made in isolated parts of the world. If this sounds wonky to you, its still fascinating to read about and might actually (someday) be a measurable mechanism of studying one potential vector for changes in human consciousness. There have been studies that attempted to trace identifiable memes through the population across generations, but I haven't read this work with any rigor, so I'm not sure if it would hold up to a critical reading.

Hmmm I have a few more thoughts to add but I have to go have dinner!
I hope your very busy day wasn't too busy... lovely talking. More soon!
Cheers-
Ari

I am very interested in this idea of memes. How do you identify a meme, and how can you gauge the potential of a meme? I'm doing my best to spread positive and virile memes around over here - I think the world is in need of them!

But the idea that evolution is now occuring through memes rather then genes is one that gives me a lot of hope. Because a good idea is simply BETTER than a bad one. All bad ideas tend to kill their bearers, don't you think?

I've read a fair bit about the concept of memes. I confess at first my sense was "yah, right," but I really tried to keep an open mind about it because the idea was so intriguing and also because it makes a certain amount of sense. So I guess, I've been infected with the "meme" meme! I haven't bought the concept lock stock and barrel, but I have fun thinking about it.

There's a scientist who has done a good deal of work in this area... I believe her name is Susan Blackwell... but I might be misremembering that. In either case, an internet search on the word "memes" will bring up a lot of good reading on the subject if you're interested.

She makes the case that one explanantion for why "being a nice person"is a desirable trait is because this meme is a benefit for survival of the individual. Nice people tend to have more friends who are willing to support them, this aids survival of this individual and assistsd passing the "nice person" mem on. The "mean person" meme is counter to survival for that person and with time, the "mean person" mem will die out. This all takes time of course, but she makes a very interesting case for exactly what you said in your post.

cheers-
Ariel
P,S, As you asked,by day I am a neuroscientist... I specialize in molecular biophysics and how the ear works.

Wow, neuroscience, and molecular biophysics! I'll be asking you a few questions about that in future!

The idea of a 'meme' meme existing and spreading around the world convincing people that such things as memes exist is in fact a proof that the concept of a 'meme' is more than 'just' a meme! Another example of meta-talk and self-reference! This stuff just don't leave me alone!

I've been following up so much stuff on the internet that I haven't gotten around to memes yet, but I sure will, soon enough!

How the ear works - is it true that we can hear a vibration that has an amplitude (displacement) of only half an atomic diameter? If that is true there might be quantum effects involved in the process. What do you think?