Roy Baumeister

Quotes From

“Conscious Thought Is for Facilitating Social and Cultural Interactions: How Mental Simulations Serve the Animal–Culture Interface” (2010)

• Conscious thought is for incorporating knowledge and rules for behavior from culture. Over time, automatic responses then come to be based on that new input.#
• Brains facilitate survival and reproduction by making helpful links between sensory input and motor output. . . . Therefore, the basic design problem for a brain is to link each stimulus to the relevant response—that is, to get the important incoming information about the environment connected to the proper place(s) in the brain where relevant knowledge is stored and optimal responses are prescribed. . . . As the brain becomes larger and more com- plex, with more different sets of information stored in various places, the difficulty of this problem (of linking stimulus to optimal response) increases exponentially#
• Conscious thought is often synonymous with reportable states.#
• Early hominid communication may have used increasingly specific gestures (sign language) augmented by vocal sounds, which over time was reversed so that, as today, people communicate mainly by speech while still using hand gestures to enhance expression. The evolution of the human brain for speech may have caused the prevalent right-handedness that is normal among humans but not found in other species.#
• The not entirely satisfactory answers regarding upright posture included freeing the hands for carrying things and making fire. (Extensive tool use came later.) The use of hands for gestural communication may well be a major part of the answer, however. Hominids who used their hands to communicate would then be able to use and share increasingly large quantities of information, which is what humans did. The proliferation of information would likely have created selection advantages for the larger brains—hence the subsequent expansion in brain size.#
• Phenomenal awareness is not just seeing what is there. Rather, the conscious experience has already had the benefit of extensive interpretive work, drawing on memory and knowledge to react appropriately to the incoming sensory data #
• The mind is actively creating sensations, not merely attending to or noticing them. As Humphrey (2006) put it, sensations are not something that happens to a person but rather are something that a person does.#
• Episodic memory may be a by-product of the capacity to simulate future events.#
• Division of labor can be achieved without theory of mind, as ant colonies show, but it must rely on fixed action patterns and therefore is limited.#
• To act responsibly is not simply to be held accountable; rather, it implies that the person considers the implications and consequences in advance of the action, in expectation of being held accountable. This is part of what conscious thought is designed to do.#