Seeing Red Revisited

I’ve previously blogged about Nicholas Humphrey’s book “Seeing Red” here. In the link above Paul Broks brilliantly dives into the hard question of consciousness.

Money quote:

Evolution then takes the animal to another level at which it comes to care about the world just beyond its body, so that, for example, it becomes sensitive to the chemical and air pressure signals of the proximity of predator or prey. This requires quite another style of information processing. “When the question is ‘What is happening to me?’ the answer that is wanted is qualitative, present-tense, transient, and subjective. When the question is ‘What is happening out there in the world?’ the answer that is wanted is quantitative, analytical, permanent, and objective.” The old sensory channels continue to provide a body-centred picture of what the stimulation is doing to the animal, but a second system is set up “to provide a more neutral, abstract, body-independent representation of the outside world.” This is the prototype of perception. At this stage the animal is still responding to stimulation with overt bodily activity, but eventually it achieves a degree of independence and is no longer bound by rigid stimulus-response rules. It still needs to know what’s going on in the world, so the old sensory systems stay in service, and it still learns about what is happening to it by monitoring the command signals for its own responses. But now it can issue virtual commands which don’t result in overt action. In other words, it no longer wriggles. Rather than going all the way out to the surface of the body, the commands are short-circuited, reaching only to a point on the incoming sensory pathway. Over evolutionary time the target of the command retreats further from the periphery until “the whole process becomes closed off from the outside world in an internal loop within the brain.” Sensory activity has become “privatised.”