Update 8/8/11: The conversation continues in Part III here.
I’m back after a hiatus of a few weeks to catch up on some stuff in the lab and the waning weeks of spring quarter teaching here at Northwestern. In my last post, I put forward an idea about why consciousness-- defined in a narrow way as “contemplation of plans” (after Bridgeman)--evolved, and used this idea to suggest some ways we might improve our consciousness in the future through augmentation technology. Here’s a quick review: Back in our watery days as fish (roughly, 350 million years ago) we were in an environment that was not friendly to sensing things far away. This is because of a hard fact about light in water, which is that our ability to see things at a far distance is drastically compromised by attenuation and scattering of light in water. A useful figure of merit is ...
