Their is some speculation at least by myself that early human intelligence evolved from the combination of our physical design meaning our ability to use tools and overrun to exhaustion most of our prey making our hunts more successful meaning more time for other activities as well as early exposure to brain altering gasses such as radon in caves where we used for shelter and the possibility that the gasses caused alterations to the brain leading to mutations such as mental disorders to be a step towards drastically changing how the brain interacts with itself. This being my theory based off the fact that certain mental disorders nowadays can provide benefit not harm such as ocd allowing you to become obsessed with something negative or positive and bipolar disorder giving you mania which is a period of increased brain activity that helps with drive, focus and a more outgoing aggressive personality compared to the defensive over cautious depressed side and these two distinct differences allow for higher survival rate and adaptability also with mania normally hyper mania occasionally allows one to hear schizophrenic style voices but in a direct focused way on what is currently getting your attention it’s like a different connection to your subconscious because mania is a hyperactive amydla. which day by day speaking is extremely different and beneficial to be so actively thinking in a unique way because your sub conscious mind remembers everything from every face to every word of text from a day and processes that information as worth saving or forgetting while you sleep which means you won’t remember everything you thought of but you will be in an increased state of intellect where your initial reaction can be consciously compared to other relative thoughts to make a original idea rather easily. Also as society evolves differences in groups of people also emerge due to differences in environment, someone with borderline personality disorder naturally changes their personality and perspective to emulate and learn from strong personalities of people they can associate with allowing them a unique ability to either change or blend or contradict personalities based on the people around them and what can help them socially. Add is hyperactivity in the brain that gives you sporatic but energized ideas and combined with ocd can become focused and obssessed with a negative or positive depending on threats or beneficial ideas, As with many disorders offering benefits and even potential evolution of the brain some can be debilitating and destructive it is a mutation that depends on the individuals ability to handle or the individuals exact mental mutation either a chemical imbalance or a developed pattern in that can be nurtured through generations basically proving the right mental disorders are evolutions of the brain.
Umm.. Okay.. Firstly, welcome to sciforums, where we embrace paragraphs. Secondly, do you have any evidence to back up your beliefs? Any studies that they were exposed to these gases in the caves where they sheltered and how those gases would have caused such alterations to their brains, which would lead to mutations such DISC1, for example? Radon, for example, is more closely linked to particular cancers, such as miners who had a prolonged exposure had a higher instance of lung cancer than those who were not. Ergo, this sentence: Particularly the part highlighted, does not really make much sense. These disorders provide more negatives than they do positives. As such, if it provided a benefit evolution wise, it would be dominant among humans today. The reality of what you seem to be arguing is a benefit: Easy as it is to respond with anxiety to these stories, it is in fact the least productive response to have in life. It is like a mental pain we inflict on ourselves, clouding our judgment and reasoning, zapping us of the energy we need to move forward with our lives and make sound decisions. Anxious thoughts activate stress hormones that trigger the brain’s fight or flight response. But this arousal is temporary, and when it abates, is followed by exhaustion, apathy and even depression. Not everyone is affected to the same degree by this tendency to react to life’s events with anxiety. We all know people who fret at the slightest thing, while others have the ability to remain calm and composed in the face of crisis. At its most chronic this tendency can lead to panic-attacks, social phobias, obsessive-compulsive behavior and post-traumatic stress disorder. [...] In the brain imaging study, the researchers discovered two distinct neural pathways that play a role in whether we develop and overcome fears. The first involves an overactive amygdala, which is home to the brain’s primal fight-or-flight reflex and plays a role in developing specific phobias. The second involves activity in the ventral prefrontal cortex, a neural region that helps us to overcome our fears and worries. Some participants were able to mobilize their ventral prefrontal cortex to reduce their fear responses even while negative events were still occurring, the study found. [...] Participants who showed overactivity in the amygdala developed much stronger fear responses to gestures that predicted screams. A second entirely separate risk factor turned out to be failure to activate the ventral prefrontal cortex. Researchers found that participants who were able to activate this region were much more capable of decreasing their fear responses, even before the screams stopped. While we may like to imagine that being manic or obsessive compulsive, for example, would be evolutionary beneficial, the reality is vastly different. Unless you think our ancestors who keep running back and forth retracing the same steps while on a hunt, just to check and make sure, is somehow beneficial? Or someone who is going through a manic episode and just doesn't stop running until they pass out from exhaustion and going into a steep mental decline, is somehow beneficial? This would not apply to the majority. For example, a large reason for homelessness is mental illness and the inability to afford treatment, not to mention the fact that many mental health facilities have been closed down for obvious reasons, but also due to lack of funding and mental health care across most parts of the world is horrifically lacking. People who you deem are "actively thinking in a unique way", may also be hallucinating, endangering themselves through exposure, lack of awareness of their surroundings, leaving themselves to self harm or harming others. How do you think this would be beneficial from an evolution standpoint? Okay.. People with borderline personality disorders are not forms of mythical chimera's who can change or alter their brains to match the status quo of those around them. People with these personality disorders tend to stand out, not because they are blending in and changing "their personalities to emulate and learn from strong personalities of people they can associate with".. On the contrary, they tend to stand out because they behave so differently and have bouts of behaviour that exist so far outside the norm of the status quo. They are then ostracised by society and often blamed for all wrongs that occur within the community or group. No. Just no. DISC1, for example, is a genetic mutation that has been found in the brain and is directly connected to mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and bi-polar. However, this is not beneficial: In postmortem brain samples of Schizophrenia patients there is an increase in insoluble DISC1 oligomer aggregates, indicative of a common link with other neurological disorders characterised by protein aggregation, namely Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and Huntington's disease. There is a general interest at present, to understand the evolution of mental illness and the genetic link, if you will. However, they do not posit that these mutations were beneficial. What they seem to indicate is that the genes involved, may have mutated away from beneficial genes, to become genes that increase the risk or chance of a mental illness. https://www.scientificamerican.com/...vel-evolution-rsquo-s-role-in-mental-illness/ At the end of the day, this is a science forum and you are required to back up your arguments with some supporting material. Even speculation has to be backed up by science. Such as, how did you come to this point? What led you to get to what you are currently arguing?
Could I just ask the logical or biological basis on which to posit a starting-point of human consciousness? Or of consciousness in general. Or of humanness, for that matter.
Consciousness seems to be an emergent quality due to the complexity of the mammalian brain. Primates & other mammals seem to be conscious. The dogs I have owned & loved seem to me to be conscious, although there might be those who disagree with me on this issue. I am not sure about other large vertebrates like reptiles & various other creatures (Example: The octopus).
Octopi are not merely conscious but quite surprisingly intelligent. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-octopuses-smart/ So are birds and whales and just about every other animal. Human hubris - and the toxic influence of religion - has caused us consistently and systematically to underestimate all our fellow creatures for five thousand years.
Good question which I have been trying to address. To say consciousness is an emergent property of complexity doesn't tell us anything about its nature and origin. As does knowledge or lack thereof about the fundamental molecules necessary for living forms in general. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! My question is when all organisms were still simple, but had the required fundamentals for evolving into complex neural systems. Not everything does. There is a whole range of organisms that can be excluded. They do not have the fundamental tools and abilities to form sentience (other than chemical reaction), let alone "consciousness". IMO, these tools are present at a very early stage in living systems, the protist stage. https://basicbiology.net/biology-101/molecules-of-life The question thus becomes which of those very early organisms do have the required tools for evolution into neural systems, proto-neurals. Hameroff identifies the Paramecium as one such single-celled organism with the required sensory abilities, but not yet requiring conscious sentience for survival. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! illustration of a "dimer". What strikes me is the apparent ability of dimers to process wave forms (tunneling) in dimer structures.
I'm a big fan of the paramecium. It has, in some rudimentary form, nearly everything we have. OTH It's hard to define "potential". Maybe an organism doesn't possess the tools (nice way to put it, but not altogether biologically accurate) or components to initiate greater complexity, but that doesn't mean it can't be struck by lightning or gamma rays, environmental factors or random mutation, and undergo the requisite changes. But, okay, we can exclude a class of organism from developing into consciousness - that still leaves a lot of contenders, early in the evolutionary race. And then, to make it even more interesting, consider the evolution of a human embryo. It attains a general consciousness before it attains a specifically human consciousness -- both are very difficult to identify.
Yes, that's why I believe that if among all conscious species and potential applicants we can find a single or a few "common denominators" associated with sensory and reactive behaviors, we would have a great baseline to start with investigating if evolution was able to form a brain structure, which learns and remembers and is able to make conscious choices. And I don't think we need to worry too much about "potential". We are looking for something that is already present in all conscious organisms and maybe in a more basic form in simpler organism. As you said, both paramecia and humans contain microtubules, but the paramecium has no neural structure other than microtubules. Yet it responds to electrical sensory stimulation. OTOH, C elegans , a worm with a neural structure but NO microtubules does not respond to electric sensory stimulation. https://cbs.umn.edu/cgc/what-c-elegans IMO, Hameroff did demonstrate the lack of neural consciousness with eletrical stimulation to which the worm did not respond at all. Can we draw a conclusion that microtubules by themselves allow for sentience, but only microtubules formed in a neural network allow for the emergence of "consciousness"? After all, humans do have neurons with microtubules inside them and we are consciously sentient. Does combining the two structural patterns produce emergent consciousness? Note: we also have subconscious neural systems like the C elegans, which are only used for control of internal organs (interoception).
But there is a lot to respond to, and some of the stimuli we don't perceive or know how to replicate. We need to make allowance for the range of experience outside of or beyond our own. Organisms live and thrive in environments we could not have imagined harbour life; they may also have properties of which we have been unaware. There is much left to learn.... Okay, that's a reasonable avenue to explore. Proto-eyes; motile appandages; heat sensors... Sure. So what? Its medium of emergence didn't have significant electrical changes. It responds to something else. Acidity? Temperature? It didn't - wouldn't have needed to - get all the way to its level of complexity without adapting to altered conditions. No. Too facile; too short-sighted.
i ponder a validational process over running its standard boundarys to include causative process that is emotionally driven rather than simple cause and effect material process. The self driving the self to be normal. The question may well need inclusion "is this drive to define normalisation, external or internal?" does it have a value that is relative to the self on a stable safe productive basis ? the irony in mani(uni polar & bi-polar disorder) is that the drive of the manic episode drives thought to become more focussed on a nature of internalisation or externalisation or both. this throws the mind into a position of being able to focus clearly by way of mass data on various subjects and ideas. it appears to seem helpful and a benefit. where in savante forms it is normalised to be massively productive in limited occurance its downside as you mention is obvious. i ponder Christopher may be passing through a mass-data(gaining momentum into a manic episode) stage where the ability to process more thought is still beneficial to the conscious mind and not too fast to be tracked back to coherant proceses of the self aclimatisation. i hope he came out the other end ok.
I think it has been proven that octopi and cuttlefish are not only highly intelligent, but their intelligence is different from mammalian intelligence. I am sure that the different environments played an important part in the "how" each species acquired the ability for survival in those environments, which are completely hostile to each other. We know why. These differences bnn may well offer clues as to the "how". These examples of separately evolved intelligence may well offer important clues as to how the environment specifically affects evolutionary brain development and in what areas of perception. IMO, assuming that all brains have some very specific common denominators, yet acquire entirely different abilities, these different dedicated processes should be detectable. The current research into the consciousness of deep water marine animals may show where and how the brain is different from mammalian brains, which might give us real insight by comparison. The environment dictates what abilities each species acquires and should give us an insight how 400,000 years of different environments affected brain development, function, and efficiency.
I tend to agree, but that might be caused by the evolution of various different organisms adapting to various different environments or variety of procreation. If we do have a common ancestor (which I question), there has to be a common denominator somewhere, and I suspect very early on. So let's find those few common denominators. If the list is short (I agree), then it should not be too hard to find a common proto-type which would allow for processing and responding to a variety of sensory information. Seems to me that the main problem lies in finding nano-scale structures in really old fossils. But, as Hazen noted, we can work backwards from various modern species and see what structures seem to have been present from very long ago and which afford at least some aspects, with potential for emergence of sentience and still later intelligence. The flagellum is one such motile structure which evolved from a prior static structure. and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_flagella IMO, the advent of the flagella was a game changer, which changed reality from energetic cellular chemical reactions to motility of organisms, along with the evolution of rudimentary "navigation" and "calculation" and still later, consciousness and abstract thinking. .
To me, consciousness implies that a part of the brain is aware of mental & physical activity. Examples I do not know how one determines that other animals have such thoughts. Because I do not consider myself to be unique, I expect other humans to have such thoughts. I believe that some (perhaps all/many) other primates have similar thoughts, but do not know what experiment would verify that belief. I have no firm belief regarding non-primates. Perhaps some one who is reading this Thread has pertinent knowledge of experimental evidence.
Usually consciousness is associated with self-awareness - AKA 'theory of mind' - the ability to understand that one's self is distinct from one's environment. One way we test for this is to see whether an animal can recognize itself in a mirror. i.e. not "Hey, that's an other dolphin!" but "Hey, that's me!"
According to Hazen, it is quite possible that life may have arisen via different paths. When we talk about probabilites, there is possibility for near duplication emerging at different times or places. He believes life in other parts of the universe is rare but not at all impossible, given what we know about the chemistry of life. Thus, if life is possible on other planets, then varieties of origin are possible one the same planet, given its chemical richness and variety of surface areas. I believe RNA (chemical construct) came before DNA, but is still part of our genetic makeup and according to Hazen, if RNA can be found elsewhere, that would make an excellent start in the evolution of more complex replication.
Indeed. But he is not talking about surviving, extant life. Life may have arisen in different forms in the youth of the planet - only one form survived. And it case there's any doubt: cephalopods and primates share a common ancestor about 560 million years ago. That's about 3 billion years of common ancestor, or about 85% of the age of life on Earth.
