{"id":110,"date":"2008-03-06T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-03-06T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=110"},"modified":"2008-03-06T11:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-03-06T19:00:00","slug":"is-this-theory-of-yours-accepted-by-any-respectable-authorities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=110","title":{"rendered":"Is this theory of yours accepted by any respectable authorities?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The long-awaited new Neuropsychologia<\/i><\/a>‘s finally on the stands, and it’s a theme issue on \u2014 wait for it \u2014 consciousness<\/i>! Lots of articles on blindsight, interhemispheric signaling, anosognosia, all that cool stuff. And nestled in the heart of this month’s episode is a paper by David Rosenthal entitled “Consciousness and its function<\/a>“.<\/p>\n

Guess what. He doesn’t think it has<\/i> any.<\/p>\n

From the abstract:<\/p>\n

\n

“…a number of suggestions are current about how the consciousness of those states may be useful … I examine these and related proposals in the light of various empirical findings and theoretical considerations and conclude that the consciousness of cognitive and desiderative states is unlikely to be useful in these or related ways. This undermines a reliance on evolutionary selection pressures in explaining why such states so often occur consciously in humans.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Rosenthal’s conclusion? Consciousness is just a side-effect, with no real adaptive value. And no, he didn’t cite Blindsight<\/i>. But we all know I went there first.<\/p>\n

Somewhere else I went, back in 1991, has been making a few online waves over the past week or two: this brief Science <\/i>article<\/a> by Christner et al<\/i>, suggesting that microbes play a major and hitherto-unsuspected role in shaping the world’s weather. As Jeremy Ruhland pointed out<\/a> a few days back, this is a wee bit reminiscent of a story<\/a> I wrote in the early nineties \u2014 a post-environmental-apocalypse number in which vast colonies of cloud-dwelling weathermongering microbes had conspired to kick our asses. For a few years now I’ve been showing this slide whenever I want to make the point that sometimes you can hit the bullseye even when you have no fucking clue what you’re talking about…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
… because really, “Nimbus” was a spontaneous, unresearched brain fart based entirely on an old girlfriend’s observation that “Ooh, look at those clouds… they almost look alive<\/i>!” But CNN is not exactly the most prestigious source of scientific intel on the planet, and besides, Moffet was just starting to look back in 2002; he hadn’t actually found anything.<\/i> That was then; this is now. You can’t get more prestigious than Science<\/i> (well, unless you’re Nature<\/i>), and now we’re looking at actual data.<\/p>\n

Of course, this is nowhere near the cozy conjunction of Watts and Rosenthal. Christner et al<\/i>. didn’t even look at clouds per s\u00e9<\/i>, only at the precipitation that had dropped out of them. And it’s not like they discovered any new and alien microbes; mostly they came up with plant pathogens. (Also, my microbe-infested clouds had a kind of slow intelligence to them \u2014 and if we ever get any evidence supporting that conceit I’ll eat my cats.) But what they did show was that microbes affect the weather\u2014 and at the very least, that leaves the door open for all sorts of evil, powerful, yet-to-be-discovered bugs lurking overhead.<\/p>\n

I like that thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The long-awaited new Neuropsychologia‘s finally on the stands, and it’s a theme issue on \u2014 wait for it \u2014 consciousness! Lots of articles on blindsight, interhemispheric signaling, anosognosia, all that cool stuff. And nestled in the heart of this month’s episode is a paper by David Rosenthal entitled “Consciousness and its function“. Guess what. He […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,9,10,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology","category-blindsight","category-neuro","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}