Human conscious minds seem unaware of many important functions of human behaviors. Humans don’t know how they breathe, digest food, or stand without falling. But conscious attention is expensive, and there seems little to be gained from conscious minds managing such processes. Also, large system changes would be required to add control and sensory neurons in order to enable such conscious management.
Very interesting. Something to consider is that our overall fertility health is not as good, and this may contribute. Now 25% of couples trying to conceive are not easily able to. There are some basic things to pay attention to to improve signs of ovulation (our most fertile time), as well as our general health. These include healthy digestion, normal blood sugar, and managing stress. Maybe these are factors.
At least in the interest of making the discussion more focused, I'm still a subscriber to the theory that "consciousness" is a side-effect from the way the brain stores memories. It doesn't require any special events to happen for it to appear and is consistent with the way we experience consciousness.
That said, to the more general point of this post, I'd suggest that we aren't conscious of those things that have not had a benefit from us being conscious of them, that is, creating concrete memories of the particular details of interest. We aren't conscious of female fertility because there was not (and probably still is not) a strong selection pressure to cause those who do notice it to reproduce more successfully, thus in the general population the details of female fertility signs are not noticed because there has been no reproductive benefit to remembering them (and thus able to notice them).
To me, that cuts the other way. Would a successful tribe allow males to skip out on multi-day hunting trips just because their mates will be fertile during the period? Making sure the tribe procures sufficient food would seem more important to genetic survival than catching one of a particular female's numerous fertile periods.
On the one hand we have an instinct which lead us to compete against other individuals (to acquire assets, success etc) - so as to advertise fitness to females. On the other, we have an instinct to raise kids. But that's time consuming and costly - and it's hard to achieve great things while doing it. So presumably (and it seems intuitively right) - the achievement instinct shuts down once a male is ensconced in a reliable relationship.
But the two don't cohere particularly well. Kids tend to get in the way of building castles in the sky. And a man that consciously believed that he wanted kids would probably also reason that he wasn't that interested in achieving great things. Such a man would be less motivated to achieve such greatness and would therefore appear as less of a catch if that instinct took over before a female had been acquired.
So how could you solve this problem? How could you be maximally motivated to achieve great things so as to advertise fitness to females, and yet not cock block yourself from mating out of unchecked ambition? Hide the fact that all you really want to do is get laid. Hide the fact that you are tuning yourself to the women around you. That way you can retain the belief in your own ambition (your desire for grand castles), and yet still navigate yourself toward raising children.
Kinda explains male mid-life crises... they get duped by their primal behaviours into raising kids and once that's done they realise their ambition component has been left unsatisfied.
The function of consciousness is to integrate the behaviour of conflicting sub-agents and form a coherent unified representation of our goals via narrative. 'Presenting a good face' (public relations) has got nothing to do with it (or at best, it's only secondary usage).
As to Bayes, that's just the mechanics of intelligence, it doesn't even scratch the surface of the true core of intelligence. It's been decades since the Bayesian revolution but do you see a whole group of Bayesian statisticians suddenly winning Nobel prizes and making great scientific breakthroughs everywhere? Of course not.
Sorry, you 'Less Wrongers' , Sing Insters and FHIers really have proved useless. I'm having to solve the whole Singularity-thing single-handedly at this point.
Is the system in equilibrium? If relatively concealed ovulation and unconscious knowledge are the current states of an "arms race" between men and women, it could be argued that men have not kept up with changes in women. The ability to consciously know might evolve over the longer-term, assuming women don't in turn improve their concealment.
WRT our lack of conscious self-awareness of many things, I'm reminded of a line I heard when I was in the enterprise software business, "Don't tell the salesmen too much, they're much more effective when they don't know they're lying."
If the conscious mind is the salesman, then lack of awareness probably makes deception more effective.
A similar argument might apply to men's lack of conscious awareness of female fertility. If you believe in "selfish genes," then it's always in male genes' interest to impregnate a female, as opposed to the female case, where long gestation and child rearing time argues for quality over quantity. Given that, from the genes' perspective, all the conscious mind can do is screw things up, by deciding that it doesn't want to get this particular female pregnant at this time. So the genes make sure the conscious mind doesn't have the information available.
Intuitively, I don't see why that sort of planning have been particularly useful to male hunter gatherers. Would the tribe have given a male member the day off from hunting because his mate was fertile? It's not like mating is a full day event.
Technically it is. If I'm out of work, I can't buy goods or services from your firm, and then you lose your job. I can't wait for the day when robots do all of the work.
robin says he's stumped about hidden fertility, but there are many published theories of it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...
something like a combination of the three possibilities he mentions is pretty well accepted: continual female receptivity to non-reproductive sex promotes pair bonding and encourages men to stick around for the meat-for-sex trade even once the kid is born and the woman is lactationally amenorrheic. keep in mind that pre-modern-era women almost never ovulate, they are almost always pregnant or amenorrheic; if the male is prevented from knowing when the small window of opportunity occurs for a subsequent conception, he is encouraged to commit for the long term.
this is a big enough improvement in the kids' survival probability to overcome an improvement in male fitness from losing interest in temporarily infertile women. moreover, hidden fertility makes the male more secure against cuckoldry, and he would be more likely to choose cooperative relationships with men more oblivious to fertility. http://www.sciencemag.org/c...
robin is skeptical because 1) "close men would want to signal their closness to a woman via their knowledge of her fertility", 2) sometimes both genders advertise a desire for short term mating, and 3) women don't report aversion to male interest in their cycle.
but, 1) women select AGAINST awareness, so it is in a male's interest to not signal awareness, 2) why should we take advertisements for desire of short-term mating at face value?, 3) why should the aversion be conscious? many of our attractions/aversions are not. moreover, if male awareness practically never occurs, ongoing maintenance of an aversion to it would fail.
interestingly, it is thought that humans lost most of their olfactory receptors due to women selecting mates that couldn't discern fertility.
off-topic: i'd like to see a post addressing whether modern society humans are post-evolutionary, to the extent that heritable phenotype has almost no relation to expected number of offspring. also, what are the evolutionary advantages of programmed senescence and menopause? starting points for this one:http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...
"Marcus, it seems much simpler to just add a preference for kids."
Also, I don't see that this is necessarily true. I don't know that selection is likely to directly genetically encode a preference for some so complicated, rather than indirectly (which already happens).
In fact, simply turning off pre-existing abilities seems far evolutionarily simpler than building entire new ones from scratch.
Very interesting. Something to consider is that our overall fertility health is not as good, and this may contribute. Now 25% of couples trying to conceive are not easily able to. There are some basic things to pay attention to to improve signs of ovulation (our most fertile time), as well as our general health. These include healthy digestion, normal blood sugar, and managing stress. Maybe these are factors.
At least in the interest of making the discussion more focused, I'm still a subscriber to the theory that "consciousness" is a side-effect from the way the brain stores memories. It doesn't require any special events to happen for it to appear and is consistent with the way we experience consciousness.
That said, to the more general point of this post, I'd suggest that we aren't conscious of those things that have not had a benefit from us being conscious of them, that is, creating concrete memories of the particular details of interest. We aren't conscious of female fertility because there was not (and probably still is not) a strong selection pressure to cause those who do notice it to reproduce more successfully, thus in the general population the details of female fertility signs are not noticed because there has been no reproductive benefit to remembering them (and thus able to notice them).
That's positive feedback for you.
To me, that cuts the other way. Would a successful tribe allow males to skip out on multi-day hunting trips just because their mates will be fertile during the period? Making sure the tribe procures sufficient food would seem more important to genetic survival than catching one of a particular female's numerous fertile periods.
Khoth and Jim, it would be bizzare if anti-fertility preferences had persisted a million years.
erik, the question is how women select against awareness.
Josh, that isn't a theory of male unawareness.
I'm also with Marcus...
On the one hand we have an instinct which lead us to compete against other individuals (to acquire assets, success etc) - so as to advertise fitness to females. On the other, we have an instinct to raise kids. But that's time consuming and costly - and it's hard to achieve great things while doing it. So presumably (and it seems intuitively right) - the achievement instinct shuts down once a male is ensconced in a reliable relationship.
But the two don't cohere particularly well. Kids tend to get in the way of building castles in the sky. And a man that consciously believed that he wanted kids would probably also reason that he wasn't that interested in achieving great things. Such a man would be less motivated to achieve such greatness and would therefore appear as less of a catch if that instinct took over before a female had been acquired.
So how could you solve this problem? How could you be maximally motivated to achieve great things so as to advertise fitness to females, and yet not cock block yourself from mating out of unchecked ambition? Hide the fact that all you really want to do is get laid. Hide the fact that you are tuning yourself to the women around you. That way you can retain the belief in your own ambition (your desire for grand castles), and yet still navigate yourself toward raising children.
Kinda explains male mid-life crises... they get duped by their primal behaviours into raising kids and once that's done they realise their ambition component has been left unsatisfied.
The function of consciousness is to integrate the behaviour of conflicting sub-agents and form a coherent unified representation of our goals via narrative. 'Presenting a good face' (public relations) has got nothing to do with it (or at best, it's only secondary usage).
As to Bayes, that's just the mechanics of intelligence, it doesn't even scratch the surface of the true core of intelligence. It's been decades since the Bayesian revolution but do you see a whole group of Bayesian statisticians suddenly winning Nobel prizes and making great scientific breakthroughs everywhere? Of course not.
Sorry, you 'Less Wrongers' , Sing Insters and FHIers really have proved useless. I'm having to solve the whole Singularity-thing single-handedly at this point.
Is the system in equilibrium? If relatively concealed ovulation and unconscious knowledge are the current states of an "arms race" between men and women, it could be argued that men have not kept up with changes in women. The ability to consciously know might evolve over the longer-term, assuming women don't in turn improve their concealment.
Have you seen David Friedman's conjecture that concealed ovulation makes it easier for women to sell sexual access in smaller units?
WRT our lack of conscious self-awareness of many things, I'm reminded of a line I heard when I was in the enterprise software business, "Don't tell the salesmen too much, they're much more effective when they don't know they're lying."
If the conscious mind is the salesman, then lack of awareness probably makes deception more effective.
A similar argument might apply to men's lack of conscious awareness of female fertility. If you believe in "selfish genes," then it's always in male genes' interest to impregnate a female, as opposed to the female case, where long gestation and child rearing time argues for quality over quantity. Given that, from the genes' perspective, all the conscious mind can do is screw things up, by deciding that it doesn't want to get this particular female pregnant at this time. So the genes make sure the conscious mind doesn't have the information available.
Hunting trips can often take several days or longer.
Intuitively, I don't see why that sort of planning have been particularly useful to male hunter gatherers. Would the tribe have given a male member the day off from hunting because his mate was fertile? It's not like mating is a full day event.
Technically it is. If I'm out of work, I can't buy goods or services from your firm, and then you lose your job. I can't wait for the day when robots do all of the work.
come to think of it, are women not typically averse to the intense physical inspection that males tend to enjoy?
robin says he's stumped about hidden fertility, but there are many published theories of it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...
something like a combination of the three possibilities he mentions is pretty well accepted: continual female receptivity to non-reproductive sex promotes pair bonding and encourages men to stick around for the meat-for-sex trade even once the kid is born and the woman is lactationally amenorrheic. keep in mind that pre-modern-era women almost never ovulate, they are almost always pregnant or amenorrheic; if the male is prevented from knowing when the small window of opportunity occurs for a subsequent conception, he is encouraged to commit for the long term.
this is a big enough improvement in the kids' survival probability to overcome an improvement in male fitness from losing interest in temporarily infertile women. moreover, hidden fertility makes the male more secure against cuckoldry, and he would be more likely to choose cooperative relationships with men more oblivious to fertility. http://www.sciencemag.org/c...
robin is skeptical because 1) "close men would want to signal their closness to a woman via their knowledge of her fertility", 2) sometimes both genders advertise a desire for short term mating, and 3) women don't report aversion to male interest in their cycle.
but, 1) women select AGAINST awareness, so it is in a male's interest to not signal awareness, 2) why should we take advertisements for desire of short-term mating at face value?, 3) why should the aversion be conscious? many of our attractions/aversions are not. moreover, if male awareness practically never occurs, ongoing maintenance of an aversion to it would fail.
interestingly, it is thought that humans lost most of their olfactory receptors due to women selecting mates that couldn't discern fertility.
off-topic: i'd like to see a post addressing whether modern society humans are post-evolutionary, to the extent that heritable phenotype has almost no relation to expected number of offspring. also, what are the evolutionary advantages of programmed senescence and menopause? starting points for this one:http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...
"Marcus, it seems much simpler to just add a preference for kids."
Also, I don't see that this is necessarily true. I don't know that selection is likely to directly genetically encode a preference for some so complicated, rather than indirectly (which already happens).
In fact, simply turning off pre-existing abilities seems far evolutionarily simpler than building entire new ones from scratch.