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Hi Steve
Thanks for inviting us to your site. I will ask the question I asked on cal catholic over here.
How does evolution explain the human consciousness?
Consciousness probably has as many definitions as life. In this case let’s say it is the ability to be self-aware and to comprehend, measure, and describe the process by which we exist.
Hello John,
From the “Consciousness” article in Wikipedia: “The issue of what consciousness is, and to what extent and in what sense it exists, is the subject of much research in philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Issues of practical concern include how the presence of consciousness can be assessed in severely ill individuals; to what extent non-humans are self conscious; at what point in fetal development consciousness begins; and whether computers can achieve conscious states.”
I don’t think there is any agreement on what causes consciousness, from an evolutionary or any other point of view. Another conundrum is free will. How can we have free will if we are made of matter that must obey physical laws? Nobody knows.
Science is open ended. Definitely, science has not explained everything, and perhaps it never will.
Keep thinking!
I don’t think free will applies to physical science. It resides within ethical categories of thought. You might want to flesh that out more.
Shouldn’t it be incumbent upon material science to explain the purpose of consciousness within the context of evolution? I think it is very important since a Christian would place that in the world of the soul.
It could be explained as a phenomena of biology that evolution favors higher states of awareness since the most aware are more likely to survive to reproduce. But then concepts like mercy and justice seem counter intuitive to survival. It could also be argued that this phenomena does not accurately describe physical reality so a lot of what is filtered through the consciousness is allusion. If that is true then it would effect the veracity of science. Truth would be a function of the perceiver. Not good for science.
There are some who believe that a sufficiently complex program instantiated into a sufficiently complex computer could be described as consciousness. I am not so sure. Even if it gave the appearance of consciousness and some way figured out how to replicate it’s physical system, is there any guarantee that the next system will NOT be unique? In other words an exact clone. Could this consciousness begin the process of physical evolution on the hardware?
When I hear statements like we share a significant portion of our DNA with worms, I have to conclude a creator. In computer science we have object oriented programming which endeavors for efficiency so it shares code blocks between widely differing programs. Like authenticatePassword could be used for thousands of wildly different programs who need pasword authentication. Shared DNA makes sense from a design perspective. Am I wrong to draw this conclusion?
Is it safe to say that evolution really only studies the adaptive mechanism of life, and is really indifferent to the notion of a creator? For example, it occurred to me one day that my ancestors were probably farmers for thousands of years and ate relatively meat-free diets until around 75 years ago. I thought at that point it was wise to knock off the American diet. That thinking was completely influenced by my feeble understanding of adaptations in nature.
Free will and the domain of science: Some people say they have free will. We are made of matter and energy and having free will appears to contradict what we know about the behavior of matter and energy. The existence of a contradiction means that there is something that we don’t know. Some scientists would like to be able to explain why some people say they have free will so they can learn whatever it is that we don’t know. So far, they have not succeeded. The scientists who work on this are generally in fields associated with the function of nerves and the brain. However, one physicist proposed that free will is the result of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle from quantum mechanics.
Consciousness and the domain of science: Some scientists would like to be able to explain consciousness. So far, they have not succeeded. Generally speaking, we scientists are very curious people. We would like to be able to explain everything. You name it, and some scientist somewhere is probably trying to explain it.
Altruism (mercy, justice) explained by evolution: Mountains of material have been written about altruism in humans and other animals. The consensus is that altruism confers an evolutionary advantage on the group, e.g. grandparents helping raise grandchildren make them more likely to survive. However, stay tuned; research continues.
Reproducibility in science: If a result is only in the mind of the experimenter, it is not science. To be scientific, a result must be reproduced by other scientists. No matter how many times Pons and Fleishman claim to have produced cold fusion, it will not be scientifically accepted until other experimenters can do it at will.
Computer consciousness: People do not only write science fiction stories about computers gaining consciousness, they are trying to produce conscious computers. Google “cyc”. Others suggest that nothing is real, that we are just a simulation running in a computer, as in the movie Matrix. Google “simulated universe”. Whether they reproduce clones does not matter. Identical twins are clones and they are conscious.
DNA and OOP Exactly correct! That is why the probability calculations of the creationists are wrong. They calculate the probability of DNA being assembled in a particular way from scratch, not the conditional probability of existing DNA being modified.
Supernatural and science: Science excludes the supernatural from consideration because the supernatural cannot be controlled. The supernatural includes a God-Creator, Roman type gods, fortune tellers, voodoo practitioners, demigods, spectres, ghosts, goblins, angels, and all the others. They are excluded, not because scientists don’t “believe in” them. They are excluded because the supernatural cannot be controlled during observations or experiments. In order to learn something about the Universe, you have to control some aspects of it and see what happens when you change something. If the supernatural is involved, you cannot know whether the result came from the variables you changed or some mischievous sprite playing tricks on you.
Diet and evolution: Exactly right! It takes about 100,000 years for a new species to evolve (very rough number). Humans are responding to the changes brought about by civilization, but things are changing faster than evolution can keep up.
Consciousness and the domain of science
Would you consider consciousness an allusion of the biology? In other words, our science reflects the organ’s of perception capabilities, rather than reality.
DNA and OOP
But at some point wasn’t there the first DNA sequence. It’s not the mutations that are freaky, it’s the original strand. I totally understand that it is much more efficient to build new programs out of existing code. It’s the first code, its intention, and that it started to form complex life. It is the original randomness of it all that is hard to grasp.
The DNA seems to be fingerprints of a creator. Do you believe that it is random or that evolution is the mechanism set in place by a creator?