I happen to be with Sagan on this one, although these ideas certainly are not mutually exclusive; in fact they are complimentary.
Consciousness is an innate emergent phenomenon that happens when you combine basic memory/context, recall, the collective evolutionary unconscious, and so many magnitudes of neurons.
In fact, he even gives dogs (and to some degree, cats) the exactly same specific pedigree of obviously being self-aware/conscious, yet commanding the traits that align with the most basic tenants of "religion": your dog thinks you are a fucking god.
It was lost when people poisoned themselves with iron at the end of the bronze age, and it doesn't mean that people hallucinate. It means that the neocortex works, and does dimensionality reduction (like an autoencoder)
Very cool.
I happen to be with Sagan on this one, although these ideas certainly are not mutually exclusive; in fact they are complimentary.
Consciousness is an innate emergent phenomenon that happens when you combine basic memory/context, recall, the collective evolutionary unconscious, and so many magnitudes of neurons.
In fact, he even gives dogs (and to some degree, cats) the exactly same specific pedigree of obviously being self-aware/conscious, yet commanding the traits that align with the most basic tenants of "religion": your dog thinks you are a fucking god.
It was lost when people poisoned themselves with iron at the end of the bronze age, and it doesn't mean that people hallucinate. It means that the neocortex works, and does dimensionality reduction (like an autoencoder)