THAT THING WE CALL CONSCIOUSNESS (important) The conscious mind (system 2: direc

THAT THING WE CALL CONSCIOUSNESS

(important)

The conscious mind (system 2: directed search[reasoning] ) rides on the elephant of intuition (system 1: intuitionistic search), which is informed by our desire to acquire, inventory, and defend, for which we obtain rewards and punishments (emotions), which are biased by our reproductive strategy(gender distributions), which is biased by our genes(variations we call personality).

Consciousness is the consequence of layers of very short term memory interacting with the results produced by continuous iterative searches of longer term memory, producing a continuous short term memory of change in state on the order of half of a second (sampling rate) to three seconds (persistence[echo]).

At least in theory, it appears that increases in brain volume (and cortical layers) could continue to expand but we are limited by the ability of females to carry and birth us while still preserving the ability to run, and limited by the rate of information transfer. Ergo we could evolve far larger brains at the cost of higher energy consumption (brains are expensive organs).

While social populations distribute SENSORY labor, instead of getting larger and larger brains evolution *suggests* that we developed language and thereby distributed COGNITIVE labor allowing for smaller less expensive brains.

Genders specialize in certain biases, and it is through cooperation and non cooperation (that is far more valuable in productivity than non-cooperation) we ‘calculate’ the evolutionary (survival) value of our biased perceptions and ‘program’ one another to perform for (mostly) common good.

So we divide perception, cognition, knowledge, labor, negotiation, and advocacy, in a network which we call ‘social order’ of different scales: friends, families, clans, tribes, nations.

And we develop formal institutions and methods of recording and measurement to assist us.

But in the end, we act on behalf of our genes. I often reduce us to acquisition-machines. All the ’emotions’ and ‘phenomenon’ are just consequences (byproducts) of the necessity to train a memory to acquire using a limited number of chemical rewards and punishments, in a network of individuals using similar information.

It’s actually all rather simple. The only complicated bit is that amazing thing we call the cortex, and its seven layers of cells that combine stimuli into categories which due to the necessity of planning actions, and then necessity of serializing the extraordinary volume of information we process into a sequence of symbols for the purpose of communication.

So between parallelization (searching) on one hand, and planning, and having to communicate on the other hand we produce ‘order’ from a continuous stream of memory of changes in state, into continuous streams of plans and language.

It’s quite elegant really.