where did thought come from??????

N

newbie56k

Registered Member
does anyone have any theories where thinking or thoughts really started. how did thinking emerge from evolution of animals. this is really strange, how we are able to think and animals can't. why are we so developed, more advanced than any other form of life on earth.

where in the evolution of man, did we progress so far. it doesn't make sense.

:confused:

does anyone have theories or any facts?????
 
Anon, I can't agree with you that insects and the other 'most lowly of creatures' have a concept of what death means.

For such creatures, it would be better to describe their thoughts as hard-wired reactions which exist to avoid death. That is completely different from the way we think.

For organisms such as the nematode worm, the brain can be completely understood in terms of this 'blind' hard-wiring.

Our brains model the surrounding environment and present it to the analytical conscious. That truly is awesome and quite mysterious.

I think I agree with you that we are just a bunch of neurons like any other animal mind, but not in your definition that 'thought ≡ neuronal activity'.

----------

How did it evolve?

I have no idea, but I'd like the talk about the problem anyway. In the spirit of accuracy I will explain any assumption or big jump.

Assuming it evolved (which is what I think) I would imagine that before there was consciousness there was simple 'hard-wired' complexes as mentioned in my above comment. That's probably a reasonable starting point, based on the fact that the simplest current day creatures only posses such arrays and we must have once come from something pretty simple that could not have afforded a serious brain.

So how would such reaction complexes be improved? When would they need to be improved? Well, minds - human or any mammal - are decision making tools which implies that there must be decision conflicts. That is to say... two or more things need to be done but cannot both or all be done at the same time. If there were no such conflicts, then all 'thinking' could be accomplished via hard-wired pathways. Of course, with any large organism there will be thousands of conflicting requirements: terrain navigation, predation / anti-predation, feeding / manipulating food, reproduction etc etc.

From my current knowledge I would suggest that the root of thinking is deterministic (not being religious) and based around a set of rules (emotions/instincts/motivations). In conjunction with a model of the environment, such an analytical system ranks behaviors based on rule hierarchy and on intensity of rule stimulation.
 
Last edited:
newbie56k said:
does anyone have any theories where thinking or thoughts really started. how did thinking emerge from evolution of animals. this is really strange, how we are able to think and animals can't. why are we so developed, more advanced than any other form of life on earth.

where in the evolution of man, did we progress so far. it doesn't make sense.

:confused:

does anyone have theories or any facts?????
Click to expand...

I've just started reading a book by antonio damasio called THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS.

This book covers everything from the origins of thoughts to how the brain
puts information together to create consiousness, its only a theory of course but its a very interesting read. I haven't got far through it at the moment but it does explain how humans have a higher level of consiousness compared to an animal, which creates "self awareness".
 
this is very helpful. the mind is such a mystery. someday i hope to understand it all. life, death and the mind.

thanks.

please go on if you have more ideas or theories.
 
It's most certainly not true that Homo sapiens is the only animal capable of thinking. Chimpanzees, gorillas, dogs, and various species of parrots -- other intelligent, social species like ourselves -- have demonstrated cognitive abilities that are difficult to dismiss as "not thinking but something less." Non-human apes and, to a lesser extent, parrots have learned to use language. Dogs can't produce either spoken or sign language due to their physiology, but their ability to understand human language continues to amaze researchers.

I'm focusing on our linguistic abilities since it's language that is customarily cited as proof of our elevated status above the rest of the animal kingdom and proof that our cognitive abilities are qualitatively superior to theirs.

If you're asking how thinking arose, bear in mind that the entire forebrain in warm-blooded animals, which is presumably the seat of thought, grew out of the olfactory lobe in the fish brain. Smell -- the ability to detect pheromones -- was the most important sense to our aquatic ancestors. Deciding what to do in response to a smell was the key to survival. If it's prey, chase it. If it's predator, swim in the opposite direction. It was natural that the olfactory lobe was the part of the brain that grew as decision-making became more complicated.

All of our complicated thought processes, including our ability to contemplate our complicated thought processes, evolved from the need to interpret and respond to the pheromones in the environment.

This is why smells are still so primal to us. We may have forgotten everything about our childhood, but let your neighbor take a cooking class and start making that same special dish your mother made when you were four years old, and you'll feel as electrified by the still-familiar smell as by anything you read here.
 
Chimpanzees, gorillas, dogs, and various species of parrots -- other intelligent, social species like ourselves -- have demonstrated cognitive abilities that are difficult to dismiss as "not thinking but something less."
Click to expand...

One of our cats can open doors. This is apparently quite common. She jumps up and hangs on the door handle (lever type not round) thus pulling it down then kicks against the door frame with hind legs. How did she think up that routine?
 
Consciousness, like many things in biology, is not discretely defined (ie, we can't say at what point in the evolutionary history of life consciousness showed up). I'm going to quote my neuro textbook in the half a page (out of 700 total! that it devotes to consciousness):

"A great deal of literature on the subject notwithstanding, these fascinating questions about consciousness are not really subject to neurobiological investigation. Although a number of contemporary scientists have advocated the idea that neurobiology will reveal the "basis" of consciousness in the near future (Nobel Laureates seeem especially prone to such pontification and include such outspoken individuals as John Eccles, Francis Crick, and Gerald Edelman), that is not likely to happen. As information grows about the nature of other animals, about computers, and indeed about the brain, the question "What is consciousness?" may simply fade from center stage in much the same way that the question "What is life?" (which stirred up similar debate earlier in the twentieth century) has become less and less frequently asked as biologists and others recognized it as an ill-posed problem that admits no definite answer." - Neuroscience 2nd ed. Purvers, et al

Given that consciousness is an ill-defined idea whose boundaries are almost trivial (that is, if we have consciousness, doesn't a chimpanzee? and if a chimpanzee has consciousness, doesn't a macaque? - ad infinitum), it's probably one of the less interesting things about our minds. I find the extraordinary plasticity of primates' minds to be far more interesting, along with such facts that our visual cortex applies Fourier transforms to visual information and bats' auditory cortex calculates the Doppler shift of a reflected screech to find out where their prey is.
 
Mr Anonymous do you write at all?? Your way of explaining things is that of a good teacher.

Animals are capable of murder, theft and hunting. Some monkeys are capable of learning and working out how to use new tools. If the monkey ages to a certain age and does not know the skill it will become incapable of learning it even if a younger monkey has cracked the skill, this shows a certain self-awareness of their environment but their brain is not geared to learn all their lives just until the reach maturity.

Maybe we are different, lets face it we are very strong animals, a well build dog could cause us fatal injury, with our ability to think for ourselves we are able to defend ourselves more and live in more varied environment which explains our exponential growth.
 
Mr Anonymous said:

if we're talking about a particular type of species, one that say licks its own arse before meals, for example, and then wonders why its food tastes a bit off afterwards,
Click to expand...
Haha, your rite on my level of thought proccess-deep respect :m:
 
newbie56k said:
does anyone have any theories where thinking or thoughts really started. how did thinking emerge from evolution of animals. this is really strange, how we are able to think and animals can't. why are we so developed, more advanced than any other form of life on earth.

where in the evolution of man, did we progress so far. it doesn't make sense.

:confused:

does anyone have theories or any facts?????
Click to expand...


Are we really that far advanced? We pollute our water, air and land, we start wars for no good reasons, we murder each other, we are rude, obtrusive and arrogent. We breed like there's food enough and services enough for the 7 billion humans here now, which there;s not as indicated by mass starvation in Africa and other nations.

It seems that the "lesser " advanced animals live within their limits and don't do all this negative stuff to their environment. So this leads back to wether we humans are really that advanced or are we just lucky bastards that are here by a fluke of the DNA code? Which makes me pause to think, doesn't it you?
 
We are those bugs it seems and eventually, if we keep on this track, humans will not be around for they will exterminate themselves by their own misdoings!
 
Mr. Bush won't be running again so you don't have to worry about voting for him again, his wife might run however and that's something you'll have to ponder.


"True, we take a lot of other species with us, but those we don't evolve in response to the damage we cause - in effect, we are as much a force of evolution as we are its product."


Well, we have made over half the animal life that was here just 500 years ago extinct and another 25 percent are on the endangered species list. At this rate we will exterminate almost all animal life in less than 100 years. You can't bring back extict species as yet so it would behoove humans to seek ways to save what's left before its all gone.
 
to me thought is just responding to stimuli, we just do it in a complex way... biologists would say that this response to stimuli is geared towards an ulimate outcome of survival and reproduction, and i agree
 
loophole said:
I've just started reading a book by antonio damasio called THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS.
I haven't got far through it at the moment but it does explain how humans have a higher level of consiousness compared to an animal, which creates "self awareness".
Click to expand...
When you get to these explanations, as to "how humans have a higher level of consciousness compared to an animal, which creates "self awareness," it would be very informative to us if you could post a few of the quotations as you read through it. Many of us think that other animals besides humans might also have "self awareness," so the explanations in this book might be of help and good interest.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top