Form: Reply

1) re: “…Everything with less agency has higher neuroticism and everything with more agency has less.” Should be self explanatory. The stronger, faster, smarter, more dangerous, more innovative, more adaptive you are, relative to your stressors, the less time you need to spend on predicting vulnerabilities. The opposite is also true. Ergo women are more neurotic than men especially because they must devote the majority of their neural effort to the prediction of the behavior of multiple children, given their frailty vs the world and everything in it, and the relative frailty of women vs men.
2) Consciousness in the literature is almost entirely some sort of spiritualism masquerading as philosophical or scientific nonsense. In practical terms it’s an artifact of the time delay of memory persistence necessary for goal setting (wayfinding) in competition with new competing amplitudes of possible goals (reactions etc). In other words if you have enough hierarchical memory you will develop it. Period. End of story. It’s a necessary artifact of the neurological process of disambiguation, organization, episodic formation (the index) and prediction from previous episodes via that index, until we find something or some set of things to seek. Likewise the brain evolved from the organization of movement, to the organization of movement relative to a nest or it’s flock, or school equivalent, in relation to locations for seeking food. So with episode (location etc), memories of other episodes, attention as goal setting, and recursive wayfinding to reach the goal, all cognition evolves as just increases in complexity of that set of primitive functions. The only interesting bit of prediction that affects our consciousness, was the evolution of the social predictions of physical (imitation), emotional (empathy), and rational (sympathy) prediction of others. Once you have that ability you gain the ability to abstract that into working with tools, and from there increasing progression into increasingly complex abstractions.

Reply addressees: @DeclineTheWest @datepsych