Evolution of the Human Mind

[Veritas Aequitas]

The evolution of moral progress has to be related to the evolution of the human mind.

While the mind is said to be embodied, i.e. intricately linked to the physical brain, I believe the mind is an additional emergent that supervene the physical brain like an Operating System represented by software in a physical computer.

The Operating System of a computer are represented by programmed codes and only works when there is electricity activating it.
Similarly, the mind is not the physical brain, but is represented by neural coding that works only when there are life forces, the entity must be alive with sufficient life forces.

The mind [analogically the OS] is supported by other [neural programs] software] to enable the mind to work like what we have at present.

Without the life-forces of a person alive, there would be no mind but merely a physical brain of a corpse; if a person is in severe coma, there is no life forces to manifest a typical human mind.
Sometimes if the brain is damaged, but if the parts that sustain the mind are not, a person may be fully aware but unable to control and move or activate certain parts of the brain.

Therefore while the brain and the mind are intricately combined, they are in a way separate entities, analogical, one is hardware and the other software.
The critical point here is there is no mind if there is no brain while there can be a brain but there is no mind.

The critical difference between the brain and mind is the 'softwares' and life-forces that enable the mind to emerge.

Evolutionary wise the physical brain began to evolve first with basic operations and the mind subsequently emerged at some point in the evolutionary calendar.
How?

[Veritas Aequitas]

Notes:

Here are two books that explain how the brain emerged first and later the brain-mind emerged.
There are many other books with the same theme of how the mind evolved from the brain.

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
by Daniel C. Dennett. Amazon

How did we come to have minds?

For centuries, this question has intrigued psychologists, physicists, poets, and philosophers, who have wondered how the human mind developed its unrivaled ability to create, imagine, and explain. Disciples of Darwin have long aspired to explain how consciousness, language, and culture could have appeared through natural selection, blazing promising trails that tend, however, to end in confusion and controversy. Even though our understanding of the inner workings of proteins, neurons, and DNA is deeper than ever before, the matter of how our minds came to be has largely remained a mystery.

That is now changing, says Daniel C. Dennett. In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, his most comprehensive exploration of evolutionary thinking yet, he builds on ideas from computer science and biology to show how a comprehending mind could in fact have arisen from a mindless process of natural selection. Part philosophical whodunit, part bold scientific conjecture, this landmark work enlarges themes that have sustained Dennett’s legendary career at the forefront of philosophical thought.

In his inimitable style―laced with wit and arresting thought experiments―Dennett explains that a crucial shift occurred when humans developed the ability to share memes, or ways of doing things not based in genetic instinct. Language, itself composed of memes, turbocharged this interplay. Competition among memes―a form of natural selection―produced thinking tools so well-designed that they gave us the power to design our own memes. The result, a mind that not only perceives and controls but can create and comprehend, was thus largely shaped by the process of cultural evolution.

An agenda-setting book for a new generation of philosophers, scientists, and thinkers, From Bacteria to Bach and Back will delight and entertain anyone eager to make sense of how the mind works and how it came about.

Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious
Antonio Damasio Amazon

From one of the world’s leading neuroscientists: a succinct, illuminating, wholly engaging investigation of how biology, neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence have given us the tools to unlock the mysteries of human consciousness

“One thrilling insight after another ... Damasio has succeeded brilliantly in narrowing the gap between body and mind.” —The New York Times Book Review

In recent decades, many philosophers and cognitive scientists have declared the problem of consciousness unsolvable, but Antonio Damasio is convinced that recent findings acrossmultiple scientific disciplines have given us a way to understand consciousness and its significance for human life.

In the forty-eight brief chapters of Feeling & Knowing, and in writing that remains faithful to our intuitive sense of what feeling and experiencing are about, Damasio helps us understand why being conscious is not the same as sensing, why nervous systems are essential for the development of feelings, and why feeling opens the way to consciousness writ large. He combines the latest discoveries in various sciences with philosophy and discusses his original research, which has transformed our understanding of the brain and human behavior.

Here is an indispensable guide to understand­ing how we experience the world within and around us and find our place in the universe.

[Veritas Aequitas]

How the brain and mind emerged in evolutionary time?

In the beginning after the Big Bang was this primordial soup of particles:
(note the Big Bang and primordial soup are not mind-independent, weird but will explain elsewhere)



Then the above soup of particles interact with various entities with their specific Framework and System of Reality [FSR] in the following timeline;

• Big Bang 13.5 billon years
  Protocells 4 billion years
  First cells, (or prokaryotes, such as bacteria),
  without a nucleus 3.8 billion years
  Photosynthesis 3.5 billion years
  First single cells with a nucleus (or eukaryotes) 2 billion years
  First multicellular organisms 700–600 million years
  First nervous cells 500 million years
  Fish 500–400 million years
  Plants 470 million years
  Mammals 200 million years
  Primates 75 million years
  Birds 60 million years
  Hominids 14–12 million years
  Homo sapiens 300 thousand years

Initially there was no mind but merely a nervous system.
Some claimed the mind emerged from the start, but this is quite a stretch.

According to Damasio, the brain is a major part of the human nervous system.
As such, the mind actually emerged out of the whole nervous system, not merely the brain but the whole body, thus the Embodied Mind.
So, humans and higher primates were only 'minded' [endowed with what we call a mind] relatively recently in evolutionary time.

Now is critical is this;
Since humans evolved from the first Protocells 4 billion years ago, we cannot deny their realization of reality within the primordial soup is also in a way a minute part of our Framework and System of Realization [FSK].
It is the same for all the other organisms from the beginning to prior to LUCA, their FSR are also embedded in the human FSR.
It is just that the human FSR is topped-up with more advance realization of reality.

This is what I meant by there is already a prior emergence and realization of reality prior to we perceiving, knowing and describing it, which PH find so hard to grasp.

Reality: Emergence & Realization Prior to Perceiving, Knowing & Describing
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40145

Thus in the emergence and realization of reality Prior to Perceiving, Knowing & Describing, we cannot ignore the elements of 13.5 billions of history that embedded as part and parcel of our brain.

So what is reality cannot be brain and mind-independent.

[Wizard22]

How?

Competition, Warfare, Strife, Conflict, that's How.

The brain organ first developed in mammals through predation, predators hunting and consuming prey animals. Once Mankind became Apex Predator in Nature, his development turned inward to in-fighting, Man against Man. Thus resources (food-fat-protein) were relegated to the victors and masters of violence. The brain developed and evolved along this line. Those that won, had prime choice of meat and nutrients, security in times of austerity and starvation. The masses starved, but the dominant groups maintained health. These periods of history are marked in the DNA codes, genetics.

Human expansion and cooperation required more sophisticated methods, greater intelligence. It's very difficult to control 10 people, let alone 100, let alone 1 million, let alone 1 billion. Hence why the human brain and mind evolves at the top of these great foundational networks.

[Atla]

The evolution of moral progress has to be related to the evolution of the human mind.

While the mind is said to be embodied, i.e. intricately linked to the physical brain, I believe the mind is an additional emergent that supervene the physical brain like an Operating System represented by software in a physical computer.

The Operating System of a computer are represented by programmed codes and only works when there is electricity activating it.
Similarly, the mind is not the physical brain, but is represented by neural coding that works only when there are life forces, the entity must be alive with sufficient life forces.

The mind [analogically the OS] is supported by other [neural programs] software] to enable the mind to work like what we have at present.

Without the life-forces of a person alive, there would be no mind but merely a physical brain of a corpse; if a person is in severe coma, there is no life forces to manifest a typical human mind.
Sometimes if the brain is damaged, but if the parts that sustain the mind are not, a person may be fully aware but unable to control and move or activate certain parts of the brain.

Therefore while the brain and the mind are intricately combined, they are in a way separate entities, analogical, one is hardware and the other software.
The critical point here is there is no mind if there is no brain while there can be a brain but there is no mind.

The critical difference between the brain and mind is the 'softwares' and life-forces that enable the mind to emerge.

Evolutionary wise the physical brain began to evolve first with basic operations and the mind subsequently emerged at some point in the evolutionary calendar.
How?

Ugh this again. There is no literal hardware-software distinction. Software isn't activated by electricity, software is literally made of electrons and is a part of the hardware. Or in other words the hardware is the extended software.

[Veritas Aequitas]

Ugh this again. There is no literal hardware-software distinction. Software isn't activated by electricity, software is literally made of electrons and is a part of the hardware. Or in other words the hardware is the extended software.

How can the OS works if there is no electricity to activate the computer.
There is no mind if there is no life-force in the brain to enable the mind to emerge.

[Atla]

How can the OS works if there is no electricity to activate the computer.
There is no mind if there is no life-force in the brain to enable the mind to emerge.

Now funnily enough, strong emergence IS an abstract, non-real noumenon. It's just an illusory way of thinking, that has fooled many sicentists as well.

When electricity is turned off, the computer still stores the OS as a part of the hard drive, in an unchanging state. When electricity is turned on, using this and the other parts of the computer, the OS is "set in motion".

Brain works similarly, while the rest of the body is working, the electrochemical processes in the brain are actively going on. When the rest of the body stops working, the electrochemical processes in the brain also come to a stop, that's brain-death.

[Harbal]

The evolution of moral progress has to be related to the evolution of the human mind.

While the mind is said to be embodied, i.e. intricately linked to the physical brain, I believe the mind is an additional emergent that supervene the physical brain like an Operating System represented by software in a physical computer.

The Operating System of a computer are represented by programmed codes and only works when there is electricity activating it.
Similarly, the mind is not the physical brain, but is represented by neural coding that works only when there are life forces, the entity must be alive with sufficient life forces.

The mind [analogically the OS] is supported by other [neural programs] software] to enable the mind to work like what we have at present.

But, surely, if you use a computer analogy for the brain and mind, the OS would be in the brain, and the mind would be analogous to the operator of the computer. The mind has access to processes and information within the brain, but it doesn't contain the instructions that enable the brain to function.

[Impenitent]

the 8088 "evolved" into the 80286

the binary bytes got bigger as appetites increased

the underpinning of Pascal was averaged out by C++

the ROM must have been infected with a moral virus...

punch some more cards

-Imp