http://www.gurdjieff-con.net/2009/09/13/consciousness-and-evolution-in-bennett/ Debriefing the Gurdjieff work Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:41:49 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 http://www.gurdjieff-con.net/2009/09/13/consciousness-and-evolution-in-bennett/comment-page-1/#comment-35295 Darwiniana » J.G. Bennett on the evolution of consciousness Sun, 13 Sep 2009 23:36:21 +0000 http://www.gurdjieff-con.net/?p=909#comment-35295 [...] Consciousness and evolution in Bennett Over at The Gurdjieff Con I put up some material from J. G. Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe on the issue of consciousness and human evolution, material so far from standard science as to be New Age science fiction, material I don’t accept, but whose very existence provokes a realization of our ignorance of how consciousness evolved. A closer look shows a series of cogent questions dressed up in a strange systematics created by Bennett. One issue is that for Bennett consciousness is not the same as the ‘awareness’ (or what he calls sensitivity) of the animal realm (and hence also human/animal realm). This is the most difficult part of human psychology to understand, and one can argue that Bennett imperfectly understood it, then created a myth to account for it. But the basic issue won’t go away: the emergence of mind is a great discontinuity of nature, as great as the passage from matter to life. The point here is that Bennett could be crazy as a koot, but has nonetheless produced a formalized model, however outlandish, to take into account this factor. The result is a design argument of another kind that would shock the Discovery Institute gang out of its boots. [...] [...] Consciousness and evolution in Bennett Over at The Gurdjieff Con I put up some material from J. G. Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe on the issue of consciousness and human evolution, material so far from standard science as to be New Age science fiction, material I don’t accept, but whose very existence provokes a realization of our ignorance of how consciousness evolved. A closer look shows a series of cogent questions dressed up in a strange systematics created by Bennett. One issue is that for Bennett consciousness is not the same as the ‘awareness’ (or what he calls sensitivity) of the animal realm (and hence also human/animal realm). This is the most difficult part of human psychology to understand, and one can argue that Bennett imperfectly understood it, then created a myth to account for it. But the basic issue won’t go away: the emergence of mind is a great discontinuity of nature, as great as the passage from matter to life. The point here is that Bennett could be crazy as a koot, but has nonetheless produced a formalized model, however outlandish, to take into account this factor. The result is a design argument of another kind that would shock the Discovery Institute gang out of its boots. [...]

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