The author of the article ultimately rejects the thesis of intelligence existing without consciousness at the end but it does bear some food for thought at least. We can think about other highly intelligent, but very alien animals on our planet like octopuses and consider whether or not they are cognizant of what they are doing, of whether or not they can think and perceive the world around them as we do.
On Watts' part, he presents the possibility that our consciousness is an evolutionary dead end, and reasons that it can sometimes fool us into seeing false information. If you've ever seen a selective attention test on YouTube it sort of gets the point across that your conscious attention inhibits your pattern recognition and some subtle to not subtle at all information will be missed.
Watts doesn't want to lose his consciousness, by his own word. But he also posits that other animals may be evolutionarily successful without one.
There are some other more outrageous things he toys with in his books and blog, namely that we have no free will because everything we do is a result of what chemicals are being produced at any one time in our brain, which is in turn determined by our DNA and the proteins it interacts with. He's polemic and somewhat apocalyptic in his tone and themes (in one short story he surmised the best way to stave off climate apocalypse was to collectively make the entire US, all 300 million, commit mass suicide through a convoluted mind control technique) but all his predictions and speculations are grounded in his experience as a professor of marine biology. He's an odd duck, to be sure
Something doesn't sit too well with me about having black, indigenous and Latino people kill themselves for being "American", despite being the least responsible for the climate crisis we're in. Yes, it could technically work, but that's a lot of people who don't deserve it, and that also deprives those groups of liberation from the hands of their WASP overlords.
Aha, gotcha. Well, there's centuries of theology and philosophy ingrained in our collective understanding of the world that shaking off that notion rubs people the wrong way. For my part I think it doesn't matter because either way you have no way of changing it or doing anything about it. It's like worrying about whether or not we're in a simulation; even if that were the case, there's nothing you can do about it, and nothing you can do to influence or change it, so why bother worrying?
The author of the article ultimately rejects the thesis of intelligence existing without consciousness at the end but it does bear some food for thought at least. We can think about other highly intelligent, but very alien animals on our planet like octopuses and consider whether or not they are cognizant of what they are doing, of whether or not they can think and perceive the world around them as we do.
On Watts' part, he presents the possibility that our consciousness is an evolutionary dead end, and reasons that it can sometimes fool us into seeing false information. If you've ever seen a selective attention test on YouTube it sort of gets the point across that your conscious attention inhibits your pattern recognition and some subtle to not subtle at all information will be missed.
Watts doesn't want to lose his consciousness, by his own word. But he also posits that other animals may be evolutionarily successful without one.
There are some other more outrageous things he toys with in his books and blog, namely that we have no free will because everything we do is a result of what chemicals are being produced at any one time in our brain, which is in turn determined by our DNA and the proteins it interacts with. He's polemic and somewhat apocalyptic in his tone and themes (in one short story he surmised the best way to stave off climate apocalypse was to collectively make the entire US, all 300 million, commit mass suicide through a convoluted mind control technique) but all his predictions and speculations are grounded in his experience as a professor of marine biology. He's an odd duck, to be sure
Honestly, this explains a lot.
Why is that so outrageous?
Something doesn't sit too well with me about having black, indigenous and Latino people kill themselves for being "American", despite being the least responsible for the climate crisis we're in. Yes, it could technically work, but that's a lot of people who don't deserve it, and that also deprives those groups of liberation from the hands of their WASP overlords.
Sorry I meant the free will thing I'll agree the US should kill itself one is pretty outrageous.
Aha, gotcha. Well, there's centuries of theology and philosophy ingrained in our collective understanding of the world that shaking off that notion rubs people the wrong way. For my part I think it doesn't matter because either way you have no way of changing it or doing anything about it. It's like worrying about whether or not we're in a simulation; even if that were the case, there's nothing you can do about it, and nothing you can do to influence or change it, so why bother worrying?