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If you talk to neuroscientists as a philosopher, you will be introduced to new concepts and find some go them extremely useful. One I found particularly helpful was the notion of metabolic price. If a biological brain wants to develop a new cognitive capacity, it must pay a price. The currency in which the price is paid is sugar. Additional energy must be made available and more glucose must be burned to develop and stabilize this new capacity. As in nature in general, there is no such thing as a free lunch. If an animal is to evolve, say, color vision, this new trait must pay by making new sources of food and sugar available to it. If a biological organism wants to develop a conscious self or think in concepts or master a language, then this step into a new level of mental complexity must be sustainable. It requires additional neural hardware, and that hardware requires fuel. That fuel is sugar, and the new trait must enable our animal to find this extra amount of energy in its environment.
Likewise, any good theory of consciousness must reveal how it paid for itself. (In principle, consciousness could be a by-product of other traits that paid for themselves, but the fact that it has remained stable over time suggests that it was adaptive.) A convincing theory must explain how having a world appear to you enabled you to extract more energy from your environment than a zombie could. This evolutionary perspective also helps solve the puzzle of naive realism.

Metzinger, Thomas. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 2009. (via carvalhais)
2 months ago
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