"There can be no doubt that [Neumann] has brought to his task a remarkable . . . knowledge of classical mythology, some considerable acquaintance with the comparative study of religion, and a deep understanding of those psychological views and theories evolved by C. G. Jung.""A welcome source of information for all those who are touched by the relationship between man and his myths.""No better exposition has come to us of the two Jungian themes: the evolution of consciousness in the history of mankind and the development of personality in the individual."
The Origins And History Of Consciousness Pdf Download
Ginsburg and Jablonka argue, very plausibly, that we should look in particular at learning. When we ask what sorts of cognitive processing might be facilitated or enabled by conscious experience, learning is an obvious candidate, and the idea of a link between learning and consciousness has a long history (the book includes a quotation from Romanes positing such a link in 1883). Ginsburg and Jablonka are well aware, however, that not any kind of learning will do as a reliable marker of consciousness. There is evidence that a surprising amount of learning can occur even when the stimuli are not consciously perceived.
Over the past two decades, Ginsburg and Jablonka have developed a novel approach to studying the evolutionary origins of consciousness: the Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL) framework. The central idea is that there is a distinctive type of learning that can serve as a transition marker for the evolutionary transition from non-conscious to conscious life. The goal of this paper is to stimulate discussion of the framework by providing a primer on its key claims (Part I) and a clear statement of its main empirical predictions (Part II).
Over the past 2 decades, Ginsburg and Jablonka have developed a novel approach to studying the evolutionary origins of consciousness: the Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL) framework (Ginsburg and Jablonka 2007a, b, 2010a, b, 2015; Bronfman et al. 2016a, b). This work culminated in their recent book, The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul: Learning and the Origins of Consciousness (Ginsburg and Jablonka 2019). The approach, if it succeeds, promises to place origins of consciousness research on a firm theoretical and methodological footing, in a deliberate attempt to replicate the way origins of life research was placed on firmer foundations by the work of Gánti, Maynard Smith and Szathmáry. In a review of the book, Birch (2020) posed some problems for the UAL approach and highlighted the need for more explicit predictions. Here, our aim is to stimulate discussion of the UAL framework by providing a primer on its key claims (Part I) and a clear statement of its main empirical predictions (Part II).
UAL is well-equipped to play a role in origins of consciousness research that parallels that played by unlimited heredity in origins of life research. Researchers can ask: Which extant species are capable of UAL? Can we date the origin of UAL to a particular geological period? Can we construct models of systems that are minimally sufficient to generate UAL? Can we model how those systems might have evolved? Agreeing on a transition marker allows theoretical and empirical research programmes to aim at a single, common goal, despite a potentially significant amount of underlying divergence in views about the fundamental nature of consciousness.
We think the same is true for consciousness. There can be a consensus about systems that have sufficient conditions for consciousness, and a consensus about entities that do not have any member of any empirically supported set of sufficient conditions, despite substantial disagreement about borderline cases. The boundaries between modes of being are vague. Yet the study of systems which inhabit the grey areas is of crucial importance for the understanding of the evolutionary history of both life and consciousness. 2ff7e9595c
Comments