Human consciousness

Hi Mike!A detailed answer to your question here would seriously derail this thread. So, in a very brief nutshell, natural selection is the second step of the two-step process of evolution. It's something like panning for gold - water washes away the sand leaving the heavier gold flakes to naturally settle out of the mixture. Or you can think of it as a seive filtering out less-optimum traits. The environment (all the different biological and non-biological aspects that effect the individual organism) is what does the selecting.If you'd like more detail, we'll need to open a new thread, I'm afraid. Good to see you back.

Hi Phatboy. To answer your questions:1. No. I can think of two basic reasons off the top of my head. In the first place, humans ARE animals. After all, we don't talk about Phylum Chordata and Phylum Humana. Nor do we talk about class Mammalia and class Humanum. We are inseperable parts of the life that exists on this planet - defined and constrained by the nature of Earth-life itself. In the second place, tracing the rise of humans over time, there is no single identifiable instant where "consciousness" (using the vernacular definition ~ human-level thought processes) appears. We simply can't point to a time, like July 2d, 254,806 BCE, where "consciousness" suddenly manifested itself. What we DO see, however, is a very gradual improvement in tools, for example, from basically natural rocks (among other things) associated with morphologically "non-human" animals through the computer I'm typing this on. IOW, we can very roughly trace the emergence of modern human consciousness by tracing the slow improvement in artifacts - because these artifacts evidence the increasingly sophisticated behaviors that lead to the conclusion that animals were "getting smarter" over the eons.2. No. Or rather, the existence of thought flow from a supernatural being is unevidenced. It certainly could exist, as the invisible floating red dragon living in my garage could exist (thank you Carl Sagan). However, without some kind of physical evidence of its existence - or some otherwise-unexplainable phenomenon for which the supernatural explanation is the only possibility - in the first place, you're unnecessarily multiplying entities. You're adding additional complexity that isn't required to explain what we see around us.Hope this answers your questions.edited to add: OTOH, given my opinion of lawyers, it's entirely possibly that litigation preceeded rational thought. [This message has been edited by Quetzal, 02-19-2004]