Dahms

H. Sapiens brain 2.0 User's Guide: Third Millennium AD Issue

Jeff Dahms

New features, Consciousness: The big new feature in the 2.0 brain upgrade some 50 millennia ago is reflexive self consciousness (RSC). This was engineered by a split in regular animal awareness, though ordinary awareness continues as the dominant Sapiens mode. Users may have noticed that RSC occurs briefly and relatively rarely but even so the effects ramify through the system. RSC is still in Beta, as some users have reported disorienting side effects such as wonder at the meaning of their lives. So we welcome your feedback.

Description 2.0: Generic Sapiens Description (GSD) was originally developed on the basis of the late hominid concept/linguistic tool and accompanied the launch of Sapiens brain 200K yrs ago. It was a great advance even on Hominid Description, but GSD was still highly subjective. It had little that would enable the user to describe from an 'outside' perspective, or that would differentiate self from other. The first upgrade of GSD to Folk Description 1.0 was a major development and was included in the original Sapiens Brain User's guide 1.0. It was the first substantial step to getting 'outside' total immersed subjectivity. This step was still local and constrained; it was an 'outside' objectivity built on the basis of both local group and internal to self rules for description. Folk description 1.0 had two formats - folk psychology, how the self and other selves are experienced by the self and one's local group, and folk science, how the external world is experienced by self and one's local group. It is as useful and 'true' now as it was back when it was invented.

Folk description upgrade 2.0 was the shift to a wider level of objectivity expanding its criteria from one's local group to whole of species, all of H Sapiens. The 2.0 folk science format is now several hundred years in development and is usually just called science. Oddly enough an equivalent 2.0 species wide descriptive folk psychology is yet to take off in any substantial way and 1.0 remains the standard application.

Section 6 User issues. H Sapiens habit is to use brain with little consideration of either design or function. This results in both minor and major operational problems. Some of these problems are of recent origin, arising with the development of the Sapiens brain series and some due to the long hominid heritage and even the generic animal history.

Recent issues. RSC is frequently confused with other brain functions – animal awareness that we share with all other creatures, descriptive brain activity, self narrative, and even emotions. The addition of the larger framework of 2.0 description has been a powerful advance but also the cause of much confusion usually of two extreme kinds. The first error is to think that Folk Science 2.0 (science) has some kind of ultimate godlike character/perspective, oddly enough ignoring the inherent logical contradiction in the notion. The second error is thinking that the contextual truth value of the larger 2.0 (science) supplants the contextual truth value of the local 1.0 (folk science) The absence of any 2.0 development of local folk psychology causes endless confusion and much philosophic quandary, some of which is imaginary (e.g. the free will issue) simply due to the absence of a 2.0 folk psychology.

Older issues. The necessary build route for Sapiens brain entailed the generation of considerable junk as by-product – soft and confused and much contentless concept. Brains had to be built to work automatically, and by and large they still do. Everything from basic operations to descriptive functioning, emotional response and the focus/distribution of attention run almost entirely automatically. Most brain operations which necessarily have to handle complexity at great speed are out of the range of even our regular animal awareness much less our occasional moments of RSC. The sheer scale of hominid/Sapiens brain operations has resulted in multiple functional loci – multiple 'mini-selves,' relatively discrete sets of mental habits/orientations, each with independent function and no master coordination.

The totality of brain seems to us to be what little we can see of its operation, and even that introspection, that 'seeing,' is often of dubious quality. To top all this off, nature is ruthlessly insistent that we believe what our minds tell us. Much potent and persistent illusion is created simply because of a combination of the above.

Section 7 Further development of Sapiens brain: Much species contention arises simply from the above. Apart from erroneous construction of the issues, absurdity is compounded when 2.0 users don't even hold to what they think they believe.

Further development of brain by growth of embryonic feature, expansion of existing functions and recombination of operations is contingent upon users achieving an understanding and command of 2.0.

One is reminded of the colloquial acronym common in system tech enquiry centres – RFM.