This is, in a sense, a microcosm of the argument in Daniel Dennet’s “Consciousness Explained.”
To oversimplify (and potentially butcher): consciousness results from innumerable “drafts” or guesses arising from neural interpretation of sensory input.
From Wikipedia, describing the book:
‘The brain consists of a "bundle of semi-independent agencies";[3] when "content-fixation" takes place in one of these, its effects may propagate so that it leads to the utterance of one of the sentences that make up the story in which the central character is one's "self". Dennett's view of consciousness is that it is the apparently serial account for the brain's underlying process in which multiple calculations are happening at once (that is, parallelism).”
This squares with your observation about likely early cell communication, which led (via many routes) to modern cognitive functioning.
Picked up this book just now... Seems full of red flags. In the first few pages:
- Accepts Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" without skepticism
- Aims for a scientific theory to be "respectable"
- Concludes that because sensory input to a brain seems infeasible using 1990 simulation tech (Not considering advances, using sensors etc), simulating reality to a brain isn't possible; Makes a comparison to a ladder-to-the-moon.
They're shallow, but there's such a high density of questionable statements in the first few pages, it's a red flag. I love speculative science and reading about potentially new and/or controversial ideas... but it only makes sense if I can trust the author on more concrete topics.
> "I think, therefore I am". Philosophers today are less concerned with proving one's own existence as a thinking thing (perhaps because they have decided that Descartes settled that matter quite satisfactorily)
I think you’re misinterpreting. Dennet is setting up to question Descartes’ assumption, which has been “accepted,” but he spends the first 50 or so pages of the book breaking down.
I’m not saying this book has all the answers about consciousness (quite the contrary — it has been criticized for not really “explaining consciousness” as the title implies), but I think you would find the studies and observations about how our minds generate “drafts” of reality quite compelling.
To oversimplify (and potentially butcher): consciousness results from innumerable “drafts” or guesses arising from neural interpretation of sensory input.
From Wikipedia, describing the book:
‘The brain consists of a "bundle of semi-independent agencies";[3] when "content-fixation" takes place in one of these, its effects may propagate so that it leads to the utterance of one of the sentences that make up the story in which the central character is one's "self". Dennett's view of consciousness is that it is the apparently serial account for the brain's underlying process in which multiple calculations are happening at once (that is, parallelism).”
This squares with your observation about likely early cell communication, which led (via many routes) to modern cognitive functioning.