Posted: May 22, 2014 7:39 am
kennyc #903 wrote:Theory of mind is bullshit when it comes to consciousness. Consciousness is BUILT UPON awareness.
The theory of mind bullshit is something way and far removed from awareness and layered on top of consciousness and self-consciousness in a context of survival and social interaction.
I don't know how to say it any more clearly than I have. If you have PROOF, EVIDENCE, or even RATIONAL REASONING that TOM comes or came before consciousness then let's see it,…
“Consciousness” as you and Michio Kaku are using the term (and as it is generally used) takes for granted, as a foundational assumption, that any conscious system, however simple (including thermostats), is goal-directed. Thermostats sense the temperature in order to control it, a flower senses gravity and light in order to grow upwards and photosynthesise its food. Awareness is an inherently teleological (goal-directed) concept. By contrast, modern science since Newton rejects teleology as a foundational concept, this is a basic difference from Aristotle and mediaeval theology, which took for granted that ultimate explanations are in terms of goals, either “final ends” (Aristotle) or the will of God (theologians).
So the concept of awareness or consciousness which you and Michio Kaku are using is a prescientific one, but it’s one which feels very natural and simple to all of us. We have no trouble in thinking that a flower has the goal of growing upright, or a reptile has the goal of catching prey, even though the mechanisms involved are (in modern scientific terms) very complex. (Thermostats are mechanistically simple enough, but their goal-directedness comes from the brains of their human designers, which are anything but simple.)
I am not claiming that the Theory of Mind (ToM) mechanisms in our brains are simple, or that they came before the sensory systems of, for example, reptiles – on the contrary, they are among the most recently evolved parts of the human brain. My claim is that “awareness” and “consciousness” are not among the foundational concepts of modern science, but they feel intuitively simple and foundational to us because human brains have the evolved ToM processes which enable us to predict other people rapidly and easily.
I am claiming that Theory of Mind is basic to the explanation of consciousness because it is the reason we automatically think of consciousness as simple, when in modern scientific terms it isn’t. I am not claiming that the ToM mechanisms in our brains evolved before other sensory systems.