Nicholas Humphrey - Does Evolutionary Psychology Explain Mind?

How did the human mind, with all its faculties and capacities, develop during the long evolution of human beings? 'Evolutionary psychology' is the field that hypothesizes how all our mental activities were selected for during evolution. But are the proposed mechanisms too cute, the story too pat? Some say that physical laws can never explain raw consciousness.

[fiazmultani]

If animals don't fear or think about death, then why do we find that many species avoid danger and predators? I think animals do have some awareness of death.

[kimpettersson]

I believe in metempsychosis, you can only know that you're alive, and not dead, so once our brain dies, some other sentient being is born with a new consciousness which in a way is the continuation of the former consciousness although without any memories. It's just my philosophy

[Mastermindyoung]

Joel, since you blocked me, I'll start my own comment in hopes that you'll see it...

You made a very interesting claim, but provided zero evidence to substantiate it. All I was doing was pointing that out, and waiting for you to provide something to support what you said. You are most certainly correct in that YouTube isn't the best place for rational discourse, but ask yourself if you're also guilty of that by assuming what is in the mind of someone you do not know. Enjoy your life. :-)

[wiiwillRule]

Wonderful video! I especially appreciated Dr. Humphrey's idea of sleep as a significant factor in allowing our species to adopt belief in the immortal soul. It was a really interesting realization that my consciousness does seem to "boot up" as just the same person the morning after "shutting off" to go to sleep; I could definitely see how this could seem like first hand evidence that the soul is immortal.

But a question this interview left me with is: how is it that humanity didn't find another, less supernatural way to deal with the destruction of the soul upon death? Does the idea that belief in the immortal soul is what helped us survive imply that life without the immortal soul isn't actually worthwhile to most people?

[BradHolkesvig]

These fools do not know what the mind is because they have never been used by our Creator who used the system to speak it's thoughts into to create the simulation program we're involved in. We are nothing but stored information that's being played out through this AI and Voice system. We get all our thoughts and visible images from this system within our individual minds. What we observe is not real at all. They are formed from the processing of information that's very similar how our computers work to form images. However, I do not know what kind of technology our Creator used to create the program and AI and Voice system but it has to be way beyond anything that it had us characters build with our human hands according to the beast.

The beast is the information that taught human beings how to build things with their human hands starting out with a mud brick. They got their first images from looking into the night sky and connecting the white dots into various shapes such as squares, rectangles, triangles, crosses, and shapes for weapons and tools. They also got the shapes for the characters of their written languages and mathematics from the constellations, too. I have all kinds of knowledge to help you understand that we definitely are not real people walking around on a real earth in a real universe. it's all an illusion being formed in our minds which is the AI and Voice system that we're all connected to as ONE system.