Consciousness Fundamentalism and the Decline of the West

[voodoo scientist]

This has only an indirect basis in science or empirical evidence (this basis being my preexisting knowledge). It's purely speculative. Moving on:

I've long struggled with why so many self-identified "intellectuals" and "smart people" today seem so inept at basic functioning (socializing, procreating, exercising, some even seem to have trouble with basic hygiene and feeding themselves) while excelling at any range of abstract, supposedly much more difficult problems. It seems logical that if one can do difficult, abstract problems, one can do more basic ones even easier. How hard is it to procreate, anyway?

It's actually a lot harder than it seems from a conscious point of view. I finally found the words: Consciousness Fundamentalism. One is a consciousness fundamentalist when one holds the belief that the only "good" intelligence is consciousness, and derivatively, that any behavior from non-conscious processes is "bad." This seems especially common among strong atheists, who appear to have taken to worship either their own consciousness, or consciousness as a general concept.

Fundamentalism is not intelligent, however, even when it's consciousness fundamentalism. When one limits oneself to one's consciousness, one is also limiting oneself to the restrictive factors of consciousness, namely that consciousness is slow and costly. This seems well suited to performing operations on precisely defined symbols within a precisely defined range range, such as math, but would seem to break down in less controlled situations like a bar or a sports field.

With the rising perceived all-importance of consciousness in the West, is it not possible that the West is digging its own grave - and arguably trying its hardest to drag everyone down with them - by engaging in what could be an unsolvable equation, like trying to compute the final decimal of pi? Is it not possible, or even likely, that humans' conscious processes simply lack the bandwidth, if not strictly the resources, to 'carry' all the functions of human existence that Western culture is trying to make it carry, and that this "bandwidth bottleneck" is why statistics like the correlation between higher education and falling birthrates are reported (higher education leads to higher consciousness leads to less effective computation time available for having and raising kids)?

By extension, it would seem that modern science itself could be interpreted as an attempt to make the world "fit" within the bandwidth restrictions of human consciousness by ever more narrowly defining and restricting its parts and their range, which I think is interesting.

[gone]

My young nephew is a Dr in mechanical engineering and very academically smart. However he can't complete the most basic of mundane tasks, he has no common sense.
With what you say above followed on from my previous post (I presume) I now remember that the world genius mathematicians are mostly autistic (I know it must seem I'm obsessed with autism but really this is true - I watched a BBC4 documentary on it).
As mostly those on the autistic spectrum find social situations difficult, (agan this is taking the concept to extreme) but it seem unlikely they'll produce an abundance of offsprings. So here again we have another example of where percived (and academic) intelligence fails to reproduce. This fits the theory that if nature could edit it's population of people, it doesn't give preference to intelligence, quite the opposite. Which yes I agree it's interesting.
You say the 'decline of the west' reminded me of 'Death of the West' an album by Sol Invictus - which by it's very title suggest the death of the west came with the death of paganism.

So what about the East? Where does that fit in the scheme of things?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBy2-OYwmw8[/youtube]

[Enigma]

Operationally define your use of the word consciousness. 

[voodoo scientist]

So here again we have another example of where percived (and academic) intelligence fails to reproduce. This fits the theory that if nature could edit it's population of people, it doesn't give preference to intelligence, quite the opposite. Which yes I agree it's interesting.

So what about the East? Where does that fit in the scheme of things?

Though I disagree with your anthropomorphizing of nature, autism is a somewhat good example of this, though it creates some distance between the concept and healthy people. Autistic people can be highly intelligent in the problem solving sense, yet completely unfit by evolutionary standards - I suppose I shouldn't equate intelligence with fitness any more than I should equate intelligence with consciousness - but the key difference is that autistic people simply lack the computational resources to be fit.

What I submit is that highly conscious healthy people may fail to successfully reproduce in sufficient number not because they lack the computational resources for fitness, as autistic people, but because they over-rely on consciousness in the way others over-rely on aggression - their brains are maladjusted neural networks applying strategies that can never compute their solutions in the allotted time.

The East doesn't fit in anywhere here. The West is just a convenient term describing a set of countries.

Operationally define your use of the word consciousness. 

I've been as definitive as I intend to be for the time being. Considering the time it would take to do what you ask and the very high risk of derailing the thread into a semantical discussion, I have to wonder what knowledge you would expect to produce with such a definition that you can't produce without, and why only consciousness?

[gone]

Some words come to mind in reading the post above.
like sponteneity, impulsive, risk taking etc...
then I thought the 'intelligent academics' i know do not exhibit any of those behavours. Infact the total opposite, just last week my dr friend of neuroscience said on talking about hallucinations 'Magic mushrooms (fly agaric) I wouldn't want anything to interfere with my logic'.. he's lovely and I'm no drug user either. But as you say voodoo they have thought about things and think of the consequences rather than act on impuse, say.

I've also been thinking about this kind of behavour and functioning from our reptilian brain/human brain in relations to consicousness, as the reptile (kamodo dragon for example) I can't imagine is pondering upon solving problems, but lives in his environment and does not think but acts impulsively, aggressively.

Just a thought, I thought I'd ponder upon, but I don't think I'm one of those self proclaimed intelligent people who think and therefore don't do, I wash & look good and live quite impusive & take (too) many risk. What are you voodoo? Go buy some Nike shoes and 'Just do it'!

[HexHammer]

I've long struggled with why so many self-identified "intellectuals" and "smart people" today seem so inept at basic functioning (socializing, procreating, exercising, some even seem to have trouble with basic hygiene and feeding themselves) while excelling at any range of abstract, supposedly much more difficult problems. It seems logical that if one can do difficult, abstract problems, one can do more basic ones even easier. How hard is it to procreate, anyway?

It's very simple.

In Neurology it's described that intelligences can either work together or independantly, just because your smart in 1 intelligence, doesn't mean your smart in the other, infact you can be retarded.

[gone]

Is spelling 'you are' (you're) as 'your' as in "Doesn't mean your smart" a sign of being a 'retard'?

[SWM]

hilarious. psychomother ridiculing someone for incorrect spelling.

i have often noticed numerous errors in psychomothers posts but i dont comment as i know everyone including myself makes mistakes.

after psychomother's last post i thought i would look at her previous posts to see if there are any obvious mistakes.

here we go:


behaviour [or american behavior] spelt behavour x2
consciousness spelt consicousness
spontaneity spelt sponteneity.

Some words come to mind in reading the post above.
like sponteneity, impulsive, risk taking etc...
then I thought the 'intelligent academics' i know do not exhibit any of those behavours. Infact the total opposite, just last week my dr friend of neuroscience said on talking about hallucinations 'Magic mushrooms (fly agaric) I wouldn't want anything to interfere with my logic'.. he's lovely and I'm no drug user either. But as you say voodoo they have thought about things and think of the consequences rather than act on impuse, say.

I've also been thinking about this kind of behavour and functioning from our reptilian brain/human brain in relations to consicousness, as the reptile (kamodo dragon for example) I can't imagine is pondering upon solving problems, but lives in his environment and does not think but acts impulsively, aggressively.

Just a thought, I thought I'd ponder upon, but I don't think I'm one of those self proclaimed intelligent people who think and therefore don't do, I wash & look good and live quite impusive & take (too) many risk. What are you voodoo? Go buy some Nike shoes and 'Just do it'!

[voodoo scientist]

SWM, perhaps you should go ahead and exercise those moderating powers you have as admin and moderate grammar nazism, rather than fueling it. PM, maybe you shouldn't correct other people's spelling - that's off topic and unwelcome in every thread ever.

It's very simple.

In Neurology it's described that intelligences can either work together or independantly, just because your smart in 1 intelligence, doesn't mean your smart in the other, infact you can be retarded.

I think you're using intelligence to denote something like processes here, in that you would say we have conscious, non-conscious and possibly other types of intelligences/processes coexisting in the same organism.

If that's a correct interpretation, what I'm saying is that Western culture tends to promote a fundamentalist approach that favors one intelligence/process, or at least a type of qualitatively similar process, and that this approach might be a causal factor in declining Western birthrates and possibly growth for the reasons specified.

[gone]

hehe, it has nothing do do with spelling, if you researched my post I think just this week I said I can't spell. It was about being a 'retard' I wondered if like me, people who can't spell are considered 'retards'... funny how we still derive different meanings from language.. still makes me laugh.

Anyway without deviating further it was about the label of 'retard'...

[HexHammer]

Is spelling 'you are' (you're) as 'your' as in "Doesn't mean your smart" a sign of being a 'retard'?

It means that english isn't my first language, and I should have attended more english classes as a kid, thanks.

[voodoo scientist]

This is why I don't post threads: what a waste of time.

[SWM]

shame, i thought it was a great topic starter and was one of the first that actually presented something new and made me think a little.

i havent organised my thoughts about it yet.

[SWM]

it also highlights a gap in my knowledge relating to the fundamental puprose of consciousness.

as you will know much of the processing power of the brain is outside of consciousness and from what i understand even decsion making and cognitions are happen in the brain preconsciously and are then passed into or run through consciousness.

begging the question what is the point of conciousness? unless as i say i have gap in my knowledge of consciousness which is highly probable.

[voodoo scientist]

Thread saved by the bell, but please moderate off-topic replies.

it also highlights a gap in my knowledge relating to the fundamental puprose of consciousness.

as you will know much of the processing power of the brain is outside of consciousness and from what i understand even decsion making and cognitions are happen in the brain preconsciously and are then passed into or run through consciousness.

begging the question what is the point of conciousness? unless as i say i have gap in my knowledge of consciousness which is highly probable.

My thoughts on this are kind of a jumble as well. I'm mostly formulating ideas as I go without much processing, so my apologies for any inconsistencies - please feel free to point them out.

"What's the point of consciousness?" is indeed the question. I think we can fairly assume that everyone has a 'gap in their knowledge' here, and it seems like in the absence of a real answer to it, consciousness has in Western culture been elevated to God of the Gaps. According to popular mythology of mind, there's nothing one can't compute so long as one is conscious of it - "if I can conceive of it, I can solve it." I feel like this has largely shown to be valid over long periods of time for large populations of humans, given the West's propensity for discovery.

However, I'm not convinced the same holds on the organismic level. What if engaging in the kind of complex computation that has to be done in terms of processing information down to a 'size' where it can be managed consciously ('knowledge formulation') is not feasible for the amount of fitness-relevant information a human organism will encounter in its lifespan?

In a sense, what I'm proposing is that perhaps centuries of intellectual development has rendered Western life so computationally complex that it's now improbable for the average human being to be fit for successful reproduction while maintaining social fitness, resulting in too low birthrates. One way to conceptualize it would be as information or complexity pollution causing birthrates to fall by clogging or damaging the computational component of reproduction, in the way chemical pollution or radiation might clog or damage the hormonal component.

However, if this idea of overdependence on consciousness is true, then it is also true that it came into being by way of humans applying conscious processing. If the problem created by 'consciousness overdependence' is 'complexity pollution,' then it could be argued that at least one primary purpose of consciousness is the control of perceived complexity.

For relativistic reasons, it's difficult or impossible to answer the question when we are ultimately using conscious tools to both define and solve the problem of "What is the point of consciousness?," but it can be narrowed down.

[Enigma]

So let me see if I understand you: consciousness fundamentalism is the preference for information and behavior generated in consciousness (which I'm assuming to mean the directly accessible realm of thought consulted by humans in their everyday waking lives) as opposed to information and behavior generated from swift instinctual responses.  Am I correct?

[SWM]

I am wondering if this consciousness that @voodoo refers to is a specific type of consciousness. i.e. problems solving, rational thinking, cognitions, etc, the type of concsious processing that we are inducted into  and encouraged to develop through schooling.  

consciousness is an illusive entity with somewhat fluid existence. consciousness can be expansive and inclusive of much that is happening unconsciously, experiments with psychadelics, entheogens and meditative trance suggest that consciousness can be expansive and inclusive of external, not self, existence/experiences.

i am thinking that the OP is talking about the narrowing and focusing of consciousness into a specific dimension, for the purpose of specific tasks (although the necessity of that purpose is itself questionable) and then the exagerated reliance and even celebration of this narrow range of consciousness.

[voodoo scientist]

Since the discussion seems stuck on definitions, let us define the following terms in the hope that it will allow you to proceed.

• Awareness is roughly a nervous system's behavior from environment, i.e. a person with blindsight dodging a ball they are not conscious of.
  
• Consciousness is roughly a nervous system's behavior from awareness, i.e. the same person is asked why they dodged the ball and, finding no trace of the event in their episodic memory, denies they dodged because of the ball.
  
• Metaconsciousness is roughly a nervous system's behaviors from consciousness, i.e. the person finds no record of the ball being thrown, but, knowing they are blindsighted, deduces from the context and memory of having dodged balls in the past that the movement they just made is consistent with dodging a ball and concludes they dodged a ball they were aware but not conscious of.
  
  

Assuming a degree of interdependency shouldn't break the idea unless I'm overlooking something.

[SWM]

i am happy with that definition and was operating somewhat under this definition in my previous comments.

i am still thinking that this topic is to do with the specialisation of consciousness, and the problems that this causes.

the decline of the west being through the limitations of the applicability of the specialised consciousness to the complexity of modern life.

[voodoo scientist]

Remember that I am not using 'decline of the West' in a general or moral sense here, but to specifically refer to the decline of the West in terms of its unsustainable birthrates. A population that is dropping is declining by any evolutionary definition. I'm not sure how a more specialized consciousness would lead to declining birthrates if the amount of net "consciousness time" remained roughly the same, since it seems unlikely people would primarily use consciousness for mate selection and breeding - can you explain?