“Donald Merlin in his Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (1993: see a Precise) once argued the australopithecines were limited to concrete/episodic minds: bipedal creatures able to benefit from pair-bonding, cooperative hunting, etc., but essentially of a seize-the-day mentality: the immediacy of the moment.”
“The first transition away from the instant, the present, and toward a more temporal system of knowledge acquisition and transmission was to a “mimetic” culture: the era of Homo erectus in which mankind absorbed and refashioned events to create rituals, crafts, rhythms, dance, and other pre-linguistic traditions.”
“This was followed by the evolution to mythic cultures: the result of the acquisition of speech and the invention of symbols.”
“The third transition carried oral speech to reading, writing, and an extended external memory-store seen today in computer and advanced machine or artificial Intelligence and extrinsic data-memory technologies.”
“The next stage might entail the ubiquitous and autonomous rise of external agencies, intelligent machines, or AI’s that live alongside humans as partners in some new as yet unforeseen cultural matrix or Symbolic Order yet to be envisioned or described.”
“At the same time that our external systems of culture and transmission were transforming themselves we gained new heuristic systems, adapting to local invariant conditions. Our sciences came to the forefront as external environmental, exploratory and experimental methods of analysis and data-gathering techniques. More and more humans off-loaded memory, intelligence, and analytical capacity and powers to these externalized systems through several transitions over the past few thousand years as both abstract mathematical and sensuous empirical forms of knowledge acquisition were reorganized into a transition from natural to artificial forms. In fact consciousness itself can be seen as the first anti-natural and artificial system within nature.”
“We still do not know what the conditions were that allowed the forms of consciousness humans attained to arise, whether it was a gradual form of evolution over hundreds of thousands of years; or whether there was some disjunctive great leap, or punctuated equilibria ( a theory developed by Eldredge and Gould’s (1972) own research on trilobites and snails, a macroevolutionary theory, which lead to a greater appreciation of the hierarchical structure of nature and its implications for understanding evolutionary patterns and processes).”
“Today there are three approaches to the emergence of consciousness: evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology, duel-inheritance theory.”
“As Slavoj Žižek speaking of the neurosciences and the brain, this three-pound gray mass, we get a sense of this all-devouring, all-consuming force when we look inside the body and specifically the skull—“the realization that, when we look behind the face into the skull, we find nothing; ‘there’s no one at home’ there, just piles of grey matter—it is difficult to tarry with this gap between meaning and the pure Real.””
“This raw flow of biochemical and electrical energy is so “terrifying” for two reasons.”
“First, it is faceless, personless—it has absolutely nothing to do with either the orbit of phenomenal experience or the human universe of meaning.”
“There is no indication of any genuine human quality: we are only confronted with anonymous, dull palpitations, which resemble the industrial buzzing of automatic machinery, a machinery that may amaze us with its complexity and dynamism (the plasticity of the neuronal network) but that nevertheless exists as a matrix of closed circuitry locked within its own self enclosed, self sustaining movement, a movement that is not only greater than us but also thereby appears to “threaten” our very existence as free subjects at every step.”
“Second, the passage from the pure, senseless Real of nature in its mechanism to the absolute spontaneity of the I—the rupturing advent of a dialectical leap—is stricto sensu inexplicable, for given our inability to locate the full-fledged human subject in nature, there is always a moment of arbitrariness and fiat.”
“The latter is the hard question of consciousness which is two-fold: 1) what were the conditions needed to give rise to consciousness to begin with; and 2) is the problem of explaining how and why we have qualia or phenomenal experiences—how sensations acquire characteristics, such as colors and tastes.”
“In Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, Chalmers wrote:
It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.”
“For Žižek time and time again it comes down to this, “there are two options here: either subjectivity is an illusion, or reality itself (not only epistemologically) is not-All (incomplete and open).””
“In fact for him the question is how a parallax gap could emerge from within the self-regulated biochemical and electrical activity inside the skull, how “the ‘mental’ itself explodes within the neuronal through a kind of ‘ontological explosion.’” Of course, like Chalmers, and other neuroscientists, Žižek has more questions than answers concerning this ‘ontological explosion’ of the ‘mental’ out of the biochemical mass of the brain.”