Leaderboard

Its importance to its consciousness/awareness and to its bodily movements. Consciousness is a biological adaptation that has many uses/functions. They include for humans awareness of the external world and inner and outer body states, perception, concept-formation, controlling actions, learning, remembering, language, setting priorities, problem solving, decision making, imagining, and planning. That's a very complicated list. To get a better understanding of consciousness, we can focus attention on a small part of the list and/or try to grasp the essential functions of the consciousness of creatures with a much simpler kind of consciousness. Think outside the box, especially the one that Ayn Rand made. I believe the authors of What is consciousness for? did that. I believe Pierson and Trout doing so led them to some great insights. - Consciousness and volition are integral: consciousness evolved as the platform for the volitional control of movement. - Volition is the sole causal efficacy of consciousness. - Volition directs attention which in turn directs movement. Attention to the movements of humans opens the door to a vast variety of bodily movements, especially those of the hands and fingers (using tools and machines, making things, writing, typing, etc.) and the mouth, tongue, and vocal chords (all involved in speaking). None of these things could happen without controlled bodily movements. In footnote 3 Pierson and Trout say: "By 'motor movements' we are referring to all movements of an organism, not just locomotion. Other examples would include eating, mating, speaking, freezing in place, and moving the tongue, eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth, arms, head, torso, etc. Obviously, volitional movements require extensive neurophysiology in addition to consciousness." Yes, they implicitly include hands and fingers for humans. Yet greater attention to hands and fingers should help highlight the huge significance of bodily movements to human life. If an image of a human body is distorted in size to represent the brain's dedication to various body parts, then the hands, fingers, and mouth would be far larger proportionally than the rest of the body. It would be something like this. Cortical homunculus. That's subjective, pessimistic, and a non sequitur. I was not aware that upholding animal volition in this tiny community could have such a destructive global effect on humanity. Having been involved in it for its short existence, I now hold a very contrary opinion. Consider the efficacy of animal volition versus that of human volition. Compare the efficacy of homo sapiens with its intelligence and hands to the efficacy of another species with its intelligence and hands or forepaws. Homo sapiens wins hands down. Compare what homo sapiens can do with its mouth speaking a language with what another species can do with its mouth making sounds. Homo sapiens wins again. The differences are huge and widen the gap.