How Human Consciousness Evolved | Daniel Dennett | Big Think

How Human Consciousness Evolved
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Daniel C. Dennett is the author of Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Breaking the Spell, Freedom Evolves, and Darwin's Dangerous Idea and is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He lives with his wife in North Andover, Massachusetts, and has a daughter, a son, and a grandson. He was born in Boston in 1942, the son of a historian by the same name, and received his B.A. in philosophy from Harvard in 1963. He then went to Oxford to work with Gilbert Ryle, under whose supervision he completed the D.Phil. in philosophy in 1965. He taught at U.C. Irvine from 1965 to 1971, when he moved to Tufts, where he has taught ever since, aside from periods visiting at Harvard, Pittsburgh, Oxford, and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

His first book, Content and Consciousness, appeared in 1969, followed by Brainstorms (1978), Elbow Room (1984), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), Kinds of Minds (1996), and Brainchildren: A Collection of Essays 1984-1996. Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness, was published in 2005. He co-edited The Mind's I with Douglas Hofstadter in 1981 and he is the author of over three hundred scholarly articles on various aspects on the mind, published in journals ranging from Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral and Brain Sciences to Poetics Today and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

Dennett gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 1983, the Gavin David Young Lectures at Adelaide, Australia, in 1985, and the Tanner Lecture at Michigan in 1986, among many others. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987.

He was the Co-founder (in 1985) and Co-director of the Curricular Software Studio at Tufts, and has helped to design museum exhibits on computers for the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Science in Boston, and the Computer Museum in Boston.
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DANIEL DENNETT:

Daniel Dennett has been mulling consciousness over for the last 50 years, and he’s ended up where we began: evolution. When this theory was proposed by Darwin, it inverted everything people at the time held to be true – it revealed that we were not created by intelligent design, but rather we evolved into intelligent designers ourselves. The process of evolution worked mindlessly, producing better and better human prototypes, crafting ever-more complex brains until that rhythmic, algorithmic, repetition birthed consciousness. This is what Dennett refers to as ‘competence without comprehension’. Daniel Dennett's most recent book is From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.

Daniel Dennett's most recent book is From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Daniel C. Dennett: In an entirely natural world without any supernatural mysteries you can explain the mind, the human mind, consciousness. It's been my project for 50 years and what I've come to realize is that the only way to do it right is you have to take evolution a lot more seriously and really look hard at the question of how evolution could have gotten these wonderful projects up and running that have now lead to people like you and me and all the great artistic geniuses and scientific geniuses, the real intelligent designers that now inhabit the planet instead of the imaginary intelligent designer who never existed.

For millennia people had it in mind that all the wonderful things they saw in the world, all the beautiful design of the animals and plants and living things must be due to a fabulously intelligent designer, a creator. And so it was until Darwin came along and turned that upside down and realized that in principle there could be a process with no intelligence, no comprehension, no foresight, no purpose that would just inexorably grind out algorithmically better and better and better designs of all sorts and create the living world were there had been just lifeless matter before. And this was a shocking idea to many...

[InMaTeofDeath]

I would love to smoke a blunt with this dude while watching Westworld.

[-zerenity-]

You did not argue about the arrival of human Consciousness but instead talked about intelligence; not the same thing

[gmanman]

"Instead of the imaginary intelligent designer... That never existed"




God just got rekt

[Mrcharrio]

I so want this guy to say, "Quaker Oats, it's the Right thing to do"

[leoable]

I would like Dennet to say more about his dismissal of a major missing piece of the consciousness puzzle ...'the hard
problem of Consciousness'. He talks about the development of consciousness it seems to me as the development of intelligence/habit/instinct. But it says nothing about things that are felt pain, pleasure, sound and vision etc Qualia.
I get the uncharitable feeling he doesn't want it mentioned because he has no satisfactory explanation for qualia.

[TheFearmoths]

He's talking about evolution of intelligence, not consciousness.

[stefancharon]

"and consciousness." He just throws that in at the end like it should be obvious, but it does it not follow that consciousness come with comprehension. He gave no explanation for where consciousness comes from, because he has none.

[KalElKryptonsFinest]

That single downvote is a creationist.

[KuraSourTakanHour]

The emergence of consciousness is a necessary by-product of developing of gradually more complicated, multi-cellular *mobile* macro-organisms.
Something is necessary to handle all the new sensory information in the pursuit of food and reproduction to handle complex situations, a nervous system. If this was just all governed on reflex (without consciousness/brain) an organism would not know what to do with excessive stimuli, could not stop or choose at all, or even control itself, and so overload and go nowhere. Things like starfish have a nervous system but no brain, only because the stimuli they can detect is extremely limited, so they cannot overload and they can only move something like an inch every 10 minutes (This is why the only multi-cellular organisms without consciousness are mostly plants and fungi. If you can make all the food you need and reproduce in the same spot, motion is irrelevant).

An organ is needed were all sense info comes together, is managed, filtered and stored.
Depending on the quality and frequency of stimuli they can detect, animals have differing forms of consciousness, but always require a brain for it. There is a consciousness gradient, below which organisms only function either as plants, fungi, or other cellular structures.

[jllarivee]

But my brain isn't just a computer. I actually experience.

[ForAnAngel]

Finally, the one I've been waiting for. This show was created for people like him.

[TheErudite]

WOW! I was coincidentally just talking with my GF as to the evolution of sentience (in this case 'consciousness')

We actually touched on many of these same topics, with the exception of memes... but that in itself can be broken down into the main thing we talked about: Language.

TLDR: Evolution is Awesome. (Worthy of Fear and Wonder)

Communication is incredibly important in fostering intelligence, and thus sentience.. it is the only way to trade and iterate on ideas that can than come back to 'change' the individual, and therefore the whole species.

If you look at the smartest animals in the ocean: Octopi and dolphins... you realize that we actually can see their intelligence... Octopi are extremely crafty and even a bit creative in how they maneuver round the ocean. Dolphins are extremely social and thus creative in how they interact with one another.

We realized that creativity, and thus adaptation, is likely a key component to sentience.

Humans are pretty much the most *average* species at pretty much everything... all five of our basic senses (and the rest of our not-so-basic ones) are not the best that can be found in nature... but nor are they the worst. Our muscles and skin and overall 'strength' is nothing to write home about... but nothing to scoff at either.
We're not even the most intelligent. Due to our average senses.. we cant even understand the vast complexities of different smells or sounds or visuals or tastes or even kinesthetic abilities. Many other animals have better spatial awareness and even better raw music tonalities than us.

Because of that... the ONLY thing we excel at... is creativity. Adapting. Because we HAD to... it was either figure out a way to run or hide or fight ..or die. And we're not even great at Adapting... lol... many plants and bacteria and insects adapt WAY better.

The Octopus is incredibly intelligent... but they dont have to try very hard to not die. Their camouflage and swimming/defensive abilities are so good that they can hide/get away from most anything
The dolphin is incredibly intelligent AND social... but they're pretty much at the top of their food chain. Dolphins mostly only have to worry about other dolphins... (likely why their social skills are so complex)

AND they both live in the ocean... though I may be wrong, I dont think the ocean is as dangerous/mercurial as weather is on land.

But we... we didnt have a great way to run or hide or fight or protect ourselves... the only thing we could do that worked.. was to create tools. Technology.

From the first stick to the first fire to the first house and beyond... the ONLY thing we could do survive was to be more creative than our many predators and environmental threats... and even against ourselves.

Therefore, it has come to our realization that sentience is first and foremost a kind of last-ditch thing... evolution was iterating through one thing after another.. eventually fell upon the brain.. particularly the parts that deal with pattern recognition and pattern creation... and we just so happened to have thumbs to create the patterns we see.. then we built upon and communicated these patterns.

This is why we likely have all those cognitive biases.... many of them deal with the evolutionary (mishaps in) iterations of intelligence and pattern recognition. Even religion/superstition can be explained due to the cognitive biases of over-abundant pattern recognition.

Now, we're at a point where we can take hold of evolution to direct where we want... scary... but powerful and awesome...

(Note: Sentience being the ability to self-identify (self conscious) trade ideas (memes) and express oneself (abstraction))


I know nobody will read all of this... but it was fun writing so... /shrug... take care!

[gadooze]

I guess we are created to evolve. In my mind, someone out there is enjoying watching us progress over time.

[nyx]

If I came from my mother and my mother came from my grandmother, then why does my grandmother still exist?

[exeter]

I am looking for an answer to the question of how from an arrangement of cells we call a brain, in which sentience did not exist, it then did exist? If you cannot explain just how this occurred, then you should not be making disparaging remarks about people who hold a differing opinion.
This man came nowhere close to answering that question.

[elikarpinski]

Interesting, but you really never explained how human consciousness evolved... So, downvote.

[Danishruyu]

He has a point about language. James Baldwin made the same point with the idea that human decisions and cultural practices (language is limited to culture, after all) can shape our genome. As Dennet was saying, since animals don't have language, there is no exact mechanism of intercourse, so of course they will be perceived as primitive, while humans are capable of participating in directed thinking. This really makes one appreciate evolution.

[KuraSourTakanHour]

The emergence of consciousness is a necessary by-product of developing of multi-cellular *mobile* macro-organisms. Something is necessary to handle all the new sensory information in the pursuit of food and reproduction to handle complex situations, a nervous system. If this was just all governed on reflex (without consciousness/brain) an organism would not know what to do with excessive stimuli, could not stop or choose at all, or even control itself, and so overload and go nowhere (This is why the only multi-cellular organisms without consciousness are mostly plants and fungi. If you can make all the food you need and reproduce in the same spot, motion is irrelevant).
An organ is needed were all sense info comes together, is managed, filtered and stored.
Animals have differing forms of consciousness depending on the quality and frequency of stimuli they can detect. There is a consciousness gradient, below which organisms only function either as plants, fungi, or other cellular structures. I'm not sure where starfish and sea urchins fall, they're wild cards

[ziodav]

So basically he didn’t explain how the humans became intelligent. So busy trying to show that an intelligent creator is not necessary. Question: how did the first cells develop into a human ?

[chrisdodt]

150 years later we know Darwin was right, there's no question about it. . . LOL. not an articulation of a true scientist.