Gregg, at the risk of repeating myself, what seems to be missing from your
essay on what makes us different is that we humans 'know that we know',
which allows us to contemplate our own mortality, which leads to our
neurotic, narcissistic behavior driven by the fear of death. So it comes
down to the question of what consciousness is at its base. As you know, I
don't think it is being aware, it's being aware of being aware, which is
the integration of our physiology, which evolved from the external
environment as serial endogenizations. In other words, by internalizing
aspects of the environment which became existential over the course of
evolution- elements like heavy metals, gases, other organisms (mitochondria
as bacteria). We and all other organisms made such things useful as our
physiology through cell-cell communications, which is the basis for
development, homeostasis, injury-repair and evoltuion, the aggregate of
which is what we think of as Consciousness.

On Sat, Aug 18, 2018 at 11:02 AM, Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Dear list,
>
>   I spent some time this morning crafting a draft of a blog on What Makes
> Us Different. It ended up being a bit more expanded than I originally
> anticipated. My original focus was to paint the ToK/JH picture. But what
> emerged was a five page summary of the “puzzle pieces” of our uniqueness,
> drawn from the Sept 2018 Scientific American special issue that Joe shared.
> In reading through it, I decided it was good way to summarize the current
> state of knowledge of the puzzle pieces that make us different.
>
>
>
>   I am sharing it here because I think it is a great topic for our list. I
> would welcome any suggestions or recommendations or additions.
>
>
>
>   If we as a group have a sense of these puzzle pieces, then I think
> discussion about the central missing piece, the Justification Hypothesis
> (framed by the ToK metaphysical definitional system and the BIT formulation
> of the evolution of the animal mind) can be productively had.
>
>
> Best,
>
> Gregg
>
>
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