Question by -♣-: Why did we evolve the cerebral cortex or specifically consciousness?
I mean whats the point of consciousness?
Other organisms are fine without it, so why did we evolve it?
Best answer:
Answer by don
Other “mammals have a cerebral cortex qualitatively similar to ours, though, with rare exceptions, much smaller. Some exhibit intelligence and a learned behavior and are moved by feelings and moods, even with emotional attachment and understanding. So we must give them some feelings and qualia such as we human beings experience even though it cannot be rationally established in the way that is possible by interhuman communication.”
Evolution of consciousness
http://www.pnas.org/content/89/16/7320.full.pdf
“Sir John Eccles, a distinguished scientist and Nobel Prize winner who has devoted his scientific life to the study of the mammalian brain, tells the story of how we came to be, not only as animals at the end of the hominid evolutionary line, but also as human beings possessed of reflective consciousness. Eccles traces the line of human evolutionary descent through developments such as skilled bipedal walking and dawning spirituality, linking them with the growth of the human brain. He conjectures that the beginning of human language came with Homo habilis and its greatly enlarged brain, while the mystery of self-consciousness is related to the newly developing neocortical areas of the brain.”
Evolution of the brain: creation of the self – by Sir John Carew Eccles
http://books.google.com/books?id=rM68T7L-lY4C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_navlinks_s#v=onepage&q=&f=false
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