No. Consciousness is not information. It is an additional process that
handles its own generated information. I you donīt recognize the
driving mechanism towards order in the universe, you will be running
on empty. This driving mechanism is natural selection. Things gets
selected, replicated and selected again.
In the case of humans, time ago the evolutionary psychologists and
philosophers (Dennet etc) discovered the evolutionary nature of
consciousness, that is double: For social animals, consciousness keeps
an actualized image of how the others see ourselves. This ability is
very important in order to plan future actions with/towards others
members. A memory of past actions, favors and offenses are kept in
memory for consciousness processing. This is a part of our moral
sense, that is, our navigation device in the social environment.
Additionally, by reflection on ourselves, the consciousness module can
discover the motivations of others.
The evolutionary steps for the emergence of consciousness are: 1) in
order to optimize the outcome of collaboration, a social animal start
to look the others as unique individuals, and memorize their own
record of actions. 2) Because the others do 1, the animal develop a
sense of itself and record how each one of the others see himself
(this is adaptive because 1). 3) This primitive conscious module
evolved in 02 starts to inspect first and lately, even take control of
some action with a deep social load. 4) The conscious module
attributes to an individual moral self every action triggered by the
brain, even if it driven by low instincts, just because thatīs is the
way the others see himself as individual. Thatīs why we feel ourselves
as unique individuals and with an indivisible Cartesian mind.
The consciousness ability is fairly recent in evolutionary terms. This
explain its inefficient and sequential nature. This and 03 explains why
we feel anxiety in some social situations: the cognitive load is too
much for the conscious module when he tries to take control of the
situation when self image it at a stake. This also explain why when we
travel we feel a kind of liberation: because the conscious module is
made irrelevant outside our social circle, so our more efficient lower
level modules take care of our actions
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Received on Sat May 16 2009 - 00:22:36 PDT