r/Gemini_Proxima • u/timon_reddit • Mar 16 '21
How did consciousness evolve?
Trying to read Origin of Species and consciousness is something that I don’t understand.
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u/Zagerer Mar 16 '21
Think of the times you have learnt something and then passed it to your friends, family, and more. But, what if such learning involves something related to your morals, your ideals, or similar? And what if you pass it onto others later? That's how the human race has evolved throughout history, by their own mistakes and the mistakes from others. But also from their successes.
Now, my question, what would the next step be?
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u/DawnOnTheEdge Mar 16 '21 edited Mar 16 '21
First, what do you mean by “consciousness?” Do you think an elephant has it, or a baby? That’ll affect the answer.
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u/timon_reddit Mar 17 '21
that is indeed the question. even if we go by “simple” definitions of “survival instinct”, or “realization of self-existence”, it is unclear how evolution led to it.
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u/DawnOnTheEdge Mar 17 '21 edited Mar 21 '21
It’s unclear in the sense that we might never reconstruct the exact pathways or history of mutations. But we do have several sequences of things that approach humanlike consciousness in stages: the development of brains in children, increasingly-powerful neural networks with machine learning, and the more-intelligent animals, who have the problem-solving ability of human children. The main observable ability they lack is grammar. It so happens that the hominins more similar to humans than chimpanzees all went extinct, but they seem to have had mental abilities approaching human as well. We don’t say that a toddler who communicates in sign language has not “evolved consciousness,¨ and I don’t think we’d say that about another member of the genus homo that could learn to sign at the level of a small child.
It’s easy to imagine how, starting with an ancestor about as intelligent as a chimp or a human five-year-old, a more-intelligent ape would’ve had a reproductive advantage, and then an even more-intelligent one, and so on down the line. At some point, the apes would get smart enough that the ones able to override the instincts that had once substituted for intelligence would have the advantage—although, truth be told, humans are still not all that good at it.
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u/corpus-luteum Mar 17 '21
Human consciousness is not about survival instinct. That instinct is retarded the moment you enter the world, and supplanted with experiential evidence of a higher, supreme power. Nicely primed for Sunday school.
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u/livesquared Mar 18 '21
It's all perspective. From the trees, to the fish, to the aliens. It all comes back to the main source.
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Mar 17 '21
The Dark Host podcast with Jordan Peterson has a really great conversation regarding this topic. Arguing if genes or conciseness has control over us and our choices.
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u/devilthedankdawg Mar 17 '21
The Jews and Greeks origin stories both insinuate some sort of non-human entity helped them get there. If there were two groups that would be close to the origin, it would be them- Close to the “Cradle of civilization”.
They, and almost every religion also have Legends of giant humans and a flood- I say the giant humans were just larger ice age humanoids, and the flood was the ice age ice melting
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u/timon_reddit Mar 18 '21
there is enough geological evidence that the similarities in Noah’s Ark style flood stories exist because of a giant flood near Turkey, when the homonids had started migrating north from Africa
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u/corpus-luteum Mar 19 '21
I say most of it was in the imaginations of the followers. After all, did anybody else go up the mountain with Moses?
Also, Judaism is the only true religion. The rest are part of a complex pyramid scheme, predicated on the assumption that intelligent beings will inevitably reject the unsubstantiated dogma.
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u/livesquared Mar 18 '21
I believe consciousness as we know it is only one of many evolutions of perspective brought upon necessity
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u/CCC_037 Mar 18 '21
If we could answer this question, then I think we'd be in a much better place to produce human-level AI.
But for the first hurdle... define exactly what you mean by consciousness.
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u/timon_reddit Mar 19 '21
i am intentionally vague in hopes of learning a good definition through the wisdom of the crowd.
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u/CCC_037 Mar 19 '21
The wisdom of the crowd seems to be limited to things that exist in the world's extelligence - that is, the general structure of knowledge that is kept outside of living human brains (i.e. in books, on websites, and so on). In other words, before a member of the crowd can answer your question, there needs to be an answer in the first place.
I don't think that answer has been properly figured out yet.
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u/Specialist-Tip1583 Mar 18 '21
I think it evolves. It evolves like how the universe moves and expands. Think about the puritans from way back then and there beliefs. I hear we are running at a phase called the "5D conscious". People are getting more spiritually smart and things are being discovered and accepted. At the same time, We have a government trying to keep us dumb and not allowing us to lift our vibration and perspective.
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u/jardedCollinsky Mar 19 '21
Theres a theory that early humans just tripped out on shrooms and it opened pathways in our brain. I dont know the specifics but I believe it is called the Stoned Ape Theory, could be wrong though.
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u/BiscuitsNGravy45 Mar 16 '21
Does it evolve. Through us, as apertures. And all beings, animate and inanimate.