X-Message-Number: 22370
Date: Sat, 16 Aug 2003 20:52:23 -0400
From: Francois <>
Subject: Emergence of counciousness

I read a nice little story sometime ago which illustrated how counciousness
and self awareness could have evolved in nature. Most caterpillars live in
trees. They walk along branches and twigs, looking for the leaves they eat.
When they reach the end of a twig, they feel around with their front legs,
trying to find some close by twig to keep on walking. If they find none,
they turn around and go back the way they came.

Now, if you hold a twig in your fingers and put a caterpillar on it, the
caterpillar will reach the end, do its little search dance and turn around.
If you pick up the twig at the other end, the caterpillar will again walk to
the opposite end and repeat the process. If you keep switching the end you
hold the twig by, the caterpillar will keep going back and forth until
exhausted, never realizing that something is wrong. Couciousness began when
a part of an animal's brain evolved that could monitor this activity. A
caterpillar so equiped would realize after a few trips back and forth that
something is amiss and would change strategy, like letting itself drop from
the bizarre two ended twig or something like that.

Couciousness began when part of a brain was dedicated to monitoring the
activity of the whole brain. Self referencing loops were established that
enormously increased the complexity and flexibility of the brain's activity.
It was like using the output of a video system as its input. If you do that,
you will get intricately complex and variable figures, much more complex
than intuition would lead you to expect. Maybe self-awareness is nothing
more than a way for a brain to represent its own activity. It represents the
color red as the visual impression of "red", represents a rough surface as
the tactile impression of "rough" and represents its own inner workings as
the mental impression of "self aware". It could be as simple as that.

Francois
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"First they ignore you, then they laugh at
you, then they fight you, then you win."

Mahatma Gandhi
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