Use Your Words
Explicit communication is crucial to get beyond our very limited and biased guesses: you cannot read minds—and no one can read yours.
Our Vanishing Conscience
The malformed conscience errs not from evil but from isolation—it cannot sense the field, cannot hear the teachers anymore. It follows a star of its own making, confident, smilingly ignorant, and morally disgusting.
Consciousness: The End
The light was the Sun, and my father held the Moon and the Earth in his hands.
Consciousness: The Hope
We have a shared Constitution—a body, a structure. Now we need a shared mind, and a spinal cord.
Consciousness: The Qualia
Individual consciousness is not learned, it is inherited, and it enables and powers human social-cultural learning.
Consciousness: The Sex
We face this in the same way we always have—via real conversation, with above-board, meaning-based teaching, learning, and action.
Consciousness: The Tools
Give us the tools of 2000 generations or so of cultural evolution, joint attention, high stakes, a division of labor, and a lot of work, and we can form and reform, to a significant degree, our own consciousnesses.
Consciousness: The Scene
Consciousness allowed our ancestors to spread out while maintaining cultural alignment. It operates in the same way in human infants and adults, providing for rapid cultural learning in noisy environments with significant poverties of linguistic stimuli.