- Aug 19, 2018
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I think that self awareness - or consciousness, is an emergent property. Just acting instinctively helps. But if you are aware of your environment, rather than try this or try that and hope for the best it's a huge advantage to run though the options before you act. And you need that self awareness to be able to do that. And those preconceived options are some of the antecedent conditions. IF this THEN that.But why would we need to be consciously aware of the process? If determinism is true then my mind is perfectly capable of analyzing all of the pertinent antecedent conditions without any help from little conscious me. Just do it and be done with it. But noooo... the mind has to create the illusion of a ghost in the machine. And it keeps this 'illusion' running every waking moment of my entire existence. That seems like a pretty energy intensive way of doing a deterministic thing. Considering its use of resources, that ghost in the machine must be pretty darn important.
But what exactly is this 'ghost in the machine' doing? Well, among other things, it's making choices. And it's doing this by taking the sum total of all of the antecedent conditions, weighing them, reconsidering them, re-evaluating them, and thereby... making new antecedent conditions. And it may do this again, and again, and again, until some little voice says... this is the option that I choose.
It's almost certainly a deterministic process, but a process so deeply entwined in what I am, and what I do , that I have indeed become the 'Ghost in the Machine'. I'm not simply the outcome of those antecedent conditions, I'm those antecedent conditions given a sense of right and wrong. How absolutely incredible is that... that antecedent conditions can have a sense of morality. It's on par with the universe becoming self-aware.
The thing is though, why am I conscious of this process in the first place? That couldn't have been evolution's intent. Evolution has no intent. Evolution was just selecting for something that would include the potential outcome as an antecedent condition. That's it. As far as the brain is concerned it's just one more antecedent condition among a billion other antecedent conditions. Consciousness is completely superfluous if actions are simply the byproduct of antecedent conditions.
Or is evolution doing superfluous now?
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