Reply #8: You're going to really hate this: [View All]

[phantom power]

Cunningham's stats about self-recognition in primates: those too
are real. Chimpanzees have a higher brain-to-body ratio than
orangutans(122), yet orangs consistently recognise themselves in
mirrors while chimps do so only half the time(123). Similarly, those
nonhuman species with the most sophisticated language skills are a
variety of birds and monkeys—not the presumably "more sentient"
great apes who are our closest relatives(81, 124). If you squint, facts
like these suggest that sentience might almost be a phase,
something that orangutans haven't yet grown out of but which their
more-advanced chimpanzee cousins are beginning to. (Gorillas
don't self-recognise in mirrors. Perhaps they've already grown out
of sentience, or perhaps they never grew into it.)
Of course, Humans don't fit this pattern. If it even is a pattern.
We're outliers: that's one of the points I'm making.

(...)

Finally, some very timely experimental support for this
unpleasant premise came out just as Blindsight was being copy
edited: it turns out that the unconscious mind is better at making
complex decisions than is the conscious mind(125). The conscious
mind just can't handle as many variables, apparently. Quoth one of
the researchers: “At some point in our evolution, we started to
make decisions consciously, and we're not very good at it.”

http://www.rifters.com/index.htm

http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Blindsight_Endnotes.pdf

(125) Dijksterhuis, A., et al. 2006. Science 311:1005-1007.

(126) Vince, G 2006. “'Sleeping on it' best for complex decisions.”
Newscientist.com, http://www.newscientist.com/channel/beinghuman/dn8732.html.