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by salthound
2686 days ago
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In humans, the optic nerve routes in front of the retina, creating a 14 degrees wide blind spot in our vision. The nerves could equally well route behind the retina, eliminating the blind spots essentially for free. Given how important vision was in our evolutionary past, and given our numbers, presumably people without blind spots would already exist. If so, where are they? "Evolutionary Occam's razor" arguments do not work, because evolution gets stuck in local optima all the time. There might simply be no short evolutionary route between "conscious" humans and equally fit "non-conscious" ones (whatever that means). |
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They might exist, but the adaptive advantage of eliminating the blindspot is minimal: the blindspot life particularly life threatening. The magnitude of the advantage is what matters here. Like I said, the brain is one of our most expensive organs in terms of energy.
> There might simply be no short evolutionary route between "conscious" humans and equally fit "non-conscious" ones (whatever that means).
But that's essentially the point I was making: if eliminating consciousness requires many changes to reproduce its behaviour, then clearly it serves a functional purpose that is not trivially dismissed.