{"id":67,"date":"2006-05-22T20:36:26","date_gmt":"2006-05-23T00:36:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=67"},"modified":"2006-05-22T20:36:26","modified_gmt":"2006-05-23T00:36:26","slug":"consciousness-nearly-explained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=67","title":{"rendered":"Consciousness nearly explained"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anyone interested in the scientific study of consciousness should read Nick Humphrey’s most recent lectures, Seeing Red<\/em>, and perhaps the piece he had in a fairly recent JCS <\/span>Solving the Mind Body Problem.<\/em><\/p>\n\n

I’m not sure that he’s right in his explanation of where consciousness came from and what it does — in fact I feel sure that he is wrong — but what’s interesting in this context is that his belief that the fitness-enhancing role of human consciousness is essentially that it makes life more interesting<\/em> entirely expresses his (admirably) optimistic and can-do temperament. My own doubts no doubt express a similarly temperamental rancidity. But it is surely true that any historical explanation of human consciousness must satisfy all sorts of unconscious criteria as well as all the obvious rational ones.<\/p>\n\n

There is another essay to be written on the selectionist attitudes that flicker in and out of his papers. But I doubt I will write it this summer. I have to read an enormous amount of Swedish detective stories in the next six weeks.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anyone interested in the scientific study of consciousness should read Nick Humphrey’s most recent lectures, Seeing Red, and perhaps the piece he had in a fairly recent JCS<\/span> Solving the Mind Body Problem. I’m not sure that he’s right in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}