Scientific rambling
Darwin's theory of evolution shows that species never stop, so what is the next evolutionary stage of human beings?
Imagine that humanity would continue to evolve without the threat of extinction of other species. Perhaps, we will become stronger and taller. However, tall humans are stretched thin when it comes to dealing with the harsh natural environment. Imagine that if there is a **, tall human beings will probably face death as soon as possible due to their large size and limited mobility.
Similarly, in an ice age, tall humans will be the first to encounter an existential crisis because of their large body surface area and difficulty in keeping warm.
That's where natural selection comes in: it doesn't favor tall humans, but rather individuals who are more adaptable to changes in their environment. Therefore, evolution is not the same as a change in body shape, but also a continuous sublimation of intelligence and adaptability.
Moreover, the larger the species, the greater the energy supply it needs, and the demand for material things is as difficult to meet as a bottomless pit. In the struggle for material interests, the struggle of this species will be more intense, and may even lead to more tragic racial wars, which will eventually lead to the extinction of the entire race.
Millions of years ago, humans invested all the cost of evolutionary resources into the brain, and I think the future will be the same.
So how does the brain evolve to reach its ultimate form? Biologist Peter Watts makes a point in "Blindness" – abandoning self-awareness.
Blindness refers to a very peculiar psychological phenomenon, that is, you see it, but you are completely unaware of what you see, which is a pathological psychological phenomenon, blindness is usually caused by brain damage.
For example, if there is a person who has an injury to the visual cortex of the right brain, and the visual cortex of the right brain controls the left half of the visual field, this is you holding a small wooden stick and placing it in his left field of vision, and ask him, can you see this wooden stick in my hand?
He'll tell you that he can't see anything on the left at all, but then you ask him, guess what, is this little stick in my hand horizontal or vertical?
As a result, he guessed blindly, and the accuracy rate was frighteningly high, far exceeding the level of 50% random guess.
In other words, at least part of his cerebral cortex has actually received the image of this little stick, but in his subjective experience, he is unaware of it, and he is not aware that he can see, which is blindness.
Blind patients do not have problems with their eyes, but lesions in the visual cortex prevent them from forming vision in consciousness, but vision can still play a role in unconscious behavior.
The unreliability of human perception, consciousness, reason, and logic is manifested in this process, where the senses intuit things, but the brain and consciousness deceively make people believe that they are not intuitive, and self-consciousness eventually becomes a limitation, hindering man's knowledge of the real world and the necessity of fictionalizing himself.
Our brain is an organ generated to ensure the survival of the individual, it is the engine of survival, not a truth detector, maybe it is not that human beings have accepted self-consciousness, but self-consciousness protects its existence regardless of the cost, and self-consciousness is like a black hole that binds human beings and cannot escape.
For example, every pianist knows that if he wants to fail his performance, the most effective way is to use his consciousness to direct the movement of his fingers, and every dancer and acrobat knows to relax the grip of the mind and let the body play freely, and no driver will remember how to stop and turn left and right on the way when he arrives at his destination.
Whether it's a pianist's performance, a dancer's performance, or a driver's drive, self-awareness will interfere with our performance, for a more specific example, if you are riding a bicycle, suddenly your brain has a convulsion and says, let me think about how hard my body muscles are when I ride, then there is a chance that you will not ride immediately, and you can't see people walking with the same hands and feet on the road, but there are always classmates in military training who will "turn around".
Some people will say that riding a bicycle and playing the piano can be controlled by unconscious muscle memory, but there are always many high-level thinking processes that should be said to be at the level of consciousness, such as learning a knowledge, making a plan and making decisions, mathematicians calculating formulas, scientists designing experiments, these activities always rely on self-awareness, right?
But not necessarily, Alpha Dog has become a Go master, cars have self-driving, these computer software has a very strong learning ability and self-research ability, but there is no evidence that they are self-aware.
The reason why human beings use consciousness to solve these so-called high-level problems is just that human beings are accustomed to this, but it does not mean that without consciousness, there is no intelligence to learn and solve some high-level problems.
Humans are simply blinded by their own limitations, just as a man who has been hunting for generations does not believe in the existence of a farm.
That is, self-consciousness and intelligence can be completely separated, and since consciousness is not necessary, then why should human beings have self-awareness.
Consciousness may simply be a transitional product of a particular stage of biological evolution, a stage in which an organism's brain is not strong enough to process information.
What should an organism do if its brain has evolved to an awkward stage, where it has the ability to process and analyze a lot of information it receives, but at the same time, the brain does not have enough computing power to process too much information at the same time?
Then it has to allocate limited resources to a small number of objects at a time, and this process of concentrating on processing information is consciousness.
For example, in the picture below, you can see that she is spinning clockwise, sometimes counterclockwise, because your brain doesn't have that many resources to process both possibilities at the same time.
So, consciousness emerges and focuses your processing power on one possibility, so that's like installing a training wheel to help him balance when he hasn't learned to ride a bicycle yet.
Before the human brain can evolve to be strong enough, it also needs a support wheel for consciousness to help us allocate limited cognitive resources.
If we go deeper into this brain hole, an answer is about to come out, that is, once people have passed this hurdle in evolution, the cognitive resources in the brain are sufficient, and one day, we can see clockwise and counterclockwise rotating dancers at the same time, then consciousness becomes unnecessary.
Consciousness may not only be unnecessary, but it becomes a burden, because once the brain has a "me", then the experience of "me" becomes a very important thing.
We can't help but wonder why people are always obsessed with those shallow pleasures.
It turns out that this is the brain, it craves our body to be comfortable and comfortable, and once the body goes against its wishes, the brain will release various hormones to make our body uncomfortable.
And the root of all this lies in the brain's self-awareness. It is the brain's constructed sense of self that places too much emphasis on subjective experience that can lead us to a quagmire of play.
As a result, a huge entertainment industry was created to please people's subjective experience and enjoyment.
All this is very beautiful for us to feel subjectively, but from the perspective of species evolution, it is an extreme waste of brain resources, and the extreme brain resources of human beings today are used to please our subjective experience, and are not used to do other more important things.
Because too much attention is paid to the existence of the "self", the establishment of a population union based on the guarantee of the self is also born through the exchange of commodity value, under which a perceptual social relationship is derived, and the whole society is ** above the material interests of people, but the interests are the most practical, there is nothing more practical than the elimination of their enemies, so the war began, and modern civilization is a struggle of interests after all.
At some point in the future, we may abandon our self-consciousness and indulge in our own subjective assumptions.
It is because of this subversive transformation that we are able to see things objectively, break the cognitive constraints of the senses and approach the real world. Humanity will devote all its brain resources to fighting against the natural environment, and the intelligence will be at an all-time high, and humanity will be united like never before.
However, because there is no subjective experience, all human emotions will disappear, art and entertainment will also disappear completely, due to the absence of "self", selfishness, greed, hypocrisy, vanity, jealousy, unsatisfying desires, etc., the inferior nature in human nature will also disappear completely, and we may end up living a highly social life like bees and ants, everyone is for me, I am for everyone, and everyone is an altruist.