Universal Emotions Are The Deep Engine Of Human Consciousness And The Basis Of Our Profound Affinity With Other Animals

an article by Stephen T Asma in Aeon posted by S. Abbas Raza in 3 Quarks Daily

Charles Darwin closed his On the Origin of Species (1870) with a provocative promise that ‘light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’. In his later books The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin shed some of that promised light, especially on the evolved emotional and cognitive capacities that humans shared with other mammals. In one scandalous passage, he demonstrated that four ‘defining’ characteristics of Homo sapiens – tool use, language, aesthetic sensitivity and religion ­– are all present, if rudimentary, in nonhuman animals. Even morality, he argued, arose through natural selection. Altruistic self-sacrifice might not give the individual a survival advantage, but, he wrote:

There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.

Yet Darwin’s revolutionary understanding of the evolved nature of human emotions has been neglected since. When scientists turned again to the mind a century later, the computer was the model that both sparked the cognitive sciences revolution and served as its exclusive investigative tool. The computational model of the mind has been very powerful, but it has no way (and no need) to capture the biological ingredient of motivational feeling-states, and has been unconcerned with the evolved substrate to such processes.

More here.

Warning: Both “3 Quarks Daily” and “AEON” are enormous, but very interesting, rabbit holes.

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Conscious: How to Turn Off Your Autopilot

a post by Bob Roseri for the World of Psychology blog



Today’s accelerating pace of disruptive change challenges many people’s ability to adapt. Despite our best efforts, many of us feel left behind — failing to learn quickly enough to move with the times.

The ultimate culprit is not simply a lack of awareness of developing trends or technologies. I believe it’s more fundamental than that: Many of us act on autopilot most of the time. When the going gets tough, those of us on autopilot tend to crash — or wind up landing someplace we don’t want to be.

The alternative to autopilot is what I call being conscious. Being conscious is not about being smart, though it does make us smarter. Being conscious encompasses deep self-awareness, plus awareness of our relationships and surroundings. Conscious people know themselves but are also relentlessly curious about the world.

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I realise, reading through the whole of this post, that I may know myself, crashes and all, but I am not curious about the world, let alone relentlessly so.

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Top 10 books about consciousness

an article by Adrian Owen for the Guardian

What is consciousness? At first blush this question appears to be rather simple, but with further investigation, it quickly becomes much more complex. Consciousness is the most intimate of mental experiences, and yet the hardest to explain. It is the faculty that allows you to read this sentence, to remember yesterday’s events, to enjoy music and art, and to daydream about your plans for tomorrow. It provides your whole experience of the world and yet is mysteriously altered, or absent altogether, when you fall asleep at night.

For centuries, writers have argued about both the nature and purpose of consciousness, yet several rather basic questions remain unsettled. For example: at what stage does a foetus or newborn become conscious and able to understand the world that we, as adults, inhabit? Likewise, how does animal consciousness differ from ours and why do animals not respond as we do to music and art? What would it take to construct a machine that was conscious? And finally, could conditions like coma and the vegetative state harbour conscious minds within unresponsive bodies? These are some of the thorny questions I asked in my new book Into the Grey Zone, through the lens of a neuroscientist working at the border between life and death.

Over the last 25 years, that 3lb lump of grey and white matter in our heads generates every experience we have ever had has come into much sharper focus, largely through incredible developments in brain science, and through the works of many great writers and thinkers. Here are 10 of my favourite books on the subject.

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I found the illustration at the start of the article a little disconcerting so have not reproduced it here.

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