From: everything-list@googlegroups.com 
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Kim Jones
Sent: Saturday, July 19, 2014 10:38 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: It Knows That It Knows

 





On 20 Jul 2014, at 3:11 pm, "'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List" 
<everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:

 

 

From: everything-list@googlegroups.com 
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of meekerdb
Sent: Saturday, July 19, 2014 9:49 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: It Knows That It Knows

 

On 7/19/2014 9:25 PM, Kim Jones wrote:

 

On 20 Jul 2014, at 1:44 pm, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Jul 19, 2014 at 11:26 PM, Kim Jones <kimjo...@ozemail.com.au> wrote:

 

> Consciousness comes in two flavours (that I know of): 

1. I know

2. I know that I know. (Presumably something to do with remembering that you 
knew.)

Are there any others?

 

Well, do you know that you know that you know? Even if the answer is yes after 
just a few more iteration the answer will certainly be no because you won't be 
able to follow even what the question means. And as a practical matter at least 
99% of the time you don't know that you know, you just know. Most of the time 
it would be counterproductive anyway, if you were fully aware of how you know 
that you know how to walk and chew gum at the same time you'd fall flat on your 
face. 

  John K Clark

 

 

OK. So what separates us then, from dolphins and elephants who apparently also 
'know that they know'? You aren't allowed to respond "Intelligence" because 
intelligence is what makes introspection possible in the first place. Without 
self-awareness there is no self to inspect. You can can question many things 
about the content of your consciousness. A cat can't. There needs to be a 
'knower', a 'self' or a 'subject'. Who or what is that? What part of your brain 
is more evolved than a cat's brain that allows you to say "I know"?


The language part.

Brent

 

Let us not overlook those nifty opposable thumbs that made us superior tool 
makers.

Chris

 

 

How do language and/or opposable thumbs construct an experiencing subject? 

 

I believe the question you posed was what separates us from other self-aware 
species – such as elephants, other great apes, toothed whales. In order to be a 
tool maker or linguist one presupposes that the species in question is already 
sufficiently intelligent for self-awareness to have emerged within their 
massively parallel networked neuronal sheet. 

The subject – i.e. the early hominid would already have been self-aware to the 
level at least of modern apes, and for language abilities to evolve I would 
suppose a definite notch above.

 

 

Clearly the subject precedes the existence of these things. Where does the self 
come from? 

 

Why clearly? Could not the self – the self-aware observer -- naturally emerge, 
given a system with enough parallelism (redundancy) and complexity. Elephants 
have “selves” too… so do Dolphins and Crows. Where did their “selves” come 
from? And a fair number of species appear to use tools (including octopi) it Is 
not uniquely human.

 

>>What is it? 

 

The self is an emergent phenomena within the meta-reality of our highly folded 
neural sheets (and as an aside, it seems glial cells play a vital role as well)

 

A self constructs language and sees the value of opposable thumbs. The self is 
primary.

 

Of course… speaking for myself was not suggesting otherwise. However the self 
is emergent it can only exist in a mind of sufficient complexity; it is not 
primary.

Our sense of self evolved along with our evolving linguistic abilities. I do 
not think we can even really separate our own human sense of self from our 
linguistic self. We speak our own selves to ourselves; language is bound up 
into every thought we conjure (or believe we are conjuring) from the mist of 
the moment before we thought. Even thoughts of a non-verbal nature are most 
often packaged up in our own minds with language.

Are you suggesting that language, or our superb mastery of tool-making had 
little or no effect on how our own human “self” evolved?

Chris

 

K

 

 

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