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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 28 Mar 2022

Taken: 28 Mar 2022

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The Consciousness Instinct •
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Michael Gazzaniga •

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foodprint.org/blog/what-you-eat-has-a-water-footprint
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
. . . . Sir Charles Sherrington, who wrote, “Life’s aim is an act, not a thought,” and Roger Sperry, who encourages us “to view the brain objectively for what it is, namely, a mechanism for governing motor activity.” After all, it is ‘action’ not cognition, that puts food on the table and bun in the oven. Action allowed out ancestors to survive and reproduce. Wolpert perhaps the current leader to this pack, claims that the only reason we have a brain is so that we can move in an adaptable manner. Before this riles you up, consider that the heart is a muscle whose movement you cannot live without. Motor movement procures food, chews it, and digest it. Without food, the brain can’t function and certainly can’t produce the creative aspects of life -- literature, art, and music -- which, in any event would remain tapped in the brain without motor movement for bringing them, through speech, writing, hand gestures, or facial expressions, to the external world. We need to consider this idea with the perspective it gives us. If our brain had evolved as the motor control system for the body, then thinking, planning, remembering, using the senses, and so forth are simply tools, added complexities in a layered architecture that have evolved to increase the robustness of motor control in changing and uncertain environments. That goes for learning and cognition, too. As is always the case, these evolutionary newer layers bring with them their own fragilities. ~ Page 129

THE CONSCIOUSNESS INSTINCT
2 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.

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