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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 17 Aug 2023

Taken: 16 Aug 2023

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Instinct •
From •
On the Origin of Species •
150th anniversary •
Special Edition •
Illustrated Edition •
Second excerpt •
The Consciousness Instinct •
Michael Gassaniga •
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Darwin on Instinct

Darwin on Instinct

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
I will not attempt any definition of instinct. It would be easy to show that several distinct mental actions are commonly embraced by this term; but everyone understands what is meant, when it is said that instinct implies a cuckoo to migrate and lay her eggs in other birds’ nests. An action, which we ourselves should require experience to enable us to perform, when performed by an animal, more especially by a very young one, without any experience, and when performed by many individuals in the same way, without their knowing for what purpose it is performed, is usually said to be instinctive. But I could show that none of these characters of instinct are universal. Little dose, as Pierre Huber expressed it, of judgment or reason, often comes into play, even in animals very low in the scale of nature.

Fredrick Cuvier and several of the older metaphysicians have compared instinct with habit. This comparison gives, I think, a remarkably accurate notice of the frame of mind under which an instinctive action is performed, but not of its origin. How unconsciously many habitual actions are performed, indeed not rarely in direct opposition to our conscious will! Yet they may be modified by the will or reason. Habits easily become associated with other habits, and with certain periods of time and states of the body. When once acquired, they often remain constant throughout life. . . . . Page 207 / 208

On the ORIGIN 0f SPECIES
9 months ago. Edited 9 months ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
No complex instinct can possibly be produced through natural selection, except by the slow and gradual accumulation of numerous, slight, yet profitable, variations. Hence, as in the case of corporeal structures, we ought to find in nature, not the actual transitional gradations by which each complex instinct has been acquired – for these could be found only in the lineal ancestors of each species – but we ought to find in the collateral lines of descent some evidence of such gradations; or we ought at least to be able to show that gradations of some kind are possible; and this we certainly can do. . . . Page 210

. . . Although I do not believe that any animal in the world performs an action for the exclusive good of another of a distinct species, yet each species tries to take advantage of the instincts of others, as each takes advantage of the weaker bodily structure of other's so again, in some few cases, certain instincts cannot be considered as absolutely perfect; but as details on this and other such points are not indispensable, they may be here passed over. ~ Page 210
9 months ago. Edited 9 months ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Complex instincts are more like democracies; they are identifiable but not easily localized. They emerge from the interaction of simple instincts but are not those things themselves -- just as an intricate pocket watch chugs alwy at keeping time, yet time itself is imposible to find in the watch. . . . The same is true of the consciousness instinct. Don’t think that if consciousness is an instinct, there will be a single unitary, discrete brain network generating that phenomenal self-aware state we all relish. It is not like that at all. When we visit neurological woards, armed with our ideas, you’ll recognize right away that patients who suffer from dementia, even severe dementias, are conscious. These patients with wide distributed brain lesions, a level of disruption vast enough to bring any computing machine to its knees, remain conscious. In one hospital room after another, each harboring a patient with a focal or a diffuse brain impairment, consciousness purrs along. After a tour of the wards, it begins to look like consciousness is not a system property at all. It is a property of local brain circuits. ~ Page 6 (Introduction)

. . . . The psychology professor Richard Aslin once commented to me that he felt the idea of “consciousness” was a proxy for a whole host of variables correlated with our mental lives. We use “consciousness” as shorthand to easily describe the functions of a multitude of inborn, instinctual mechanisms such as language, perception, and emotion. It becomes evident that consciousness is best understood as complex instinct as well. All of us come with a bucketful of instincts. Our incessant thought pattern jumps around. We have feelings about one idea, then its opposite, then our family, then an itch, then a favorite tune, then the upcoming meeting, then the grocery list, then the irritating colleague, then the Red Sox, then. . . . It goes on and on until we learn, almost against our natural being, to have a linear thought. ~ Page 8 (Introduction)

THE CONSCIOUSNESS INSTINCT
9 months ago. Edited 9 months ago.

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