There is a generally held belief that consciousness is a mystery of science or a miracle of faith; that consciousness was attained instantly (or granted by god), and that one has either attained self awareness or has not.

I don't believe any of that. I believe like all things in biology, consciousness evolved to maximise a benefit, and occurred gradually, without any magic or mystery. The closest exurb1a gets to that is when he says at 6:28:

"Maybe evolution accidentally made some higher mammals on Earth self-aware because it's better for problem solving or something"

We need to know what other people are thinking and this is the problem that consciousness solves. If a neighbouring tribe enters your territory then predicting whether they come to trade, mate, steal or attack is beneficial to survival.

Initially this may be done through simulation - imagining the future based on past experience. A flood approaching your cave is bad news. Being surrounded by lions is not good. Surrounding a lone bison is dinner. Being charged by a screaming tribe is an upcoming fight.

We could only simulate another person's actions, but we had no experience that allows us to simulate another person's thoughts. You may predict that giving your hungry neighbour a meal may suppress their urge to raid your supplies but you still can't simply open their head and see what they are thinking.

Then for the benefit of cooperation and coordination, we started to talk, and everything changed.

Communication not only allows us to speak our mind, but allows us to model the minds of others. We can gain an understanding of another person's motivations long before they act upon them. The need to simulate another person's thoughts becomes more nuanced and complex. Do they want to trade, or do they want to cheat?

Yet still we cannot look into the minds of others and verify our models of them. If we had access to an actual working brain we could gradually strengthen that model with reference to how an actual brain works, and we happen to have access to such a brain, our own!

If we monitored ourselves then we could validate a general model of thought against real urges, real experiences, real problem solving and real motivations. Once we apply our own selves to a model of thought we become much better at modelling the thoughts of others.

And what better way to render that model than with speech itself? To use all of our existing cognitive skills and simply simulate others sharing their thoughts with us.

At 3:15 exurb1a referenced a famous experiment that showed that we make decisions before we become aware of them. This lends evidence to suppose that our consciousness is not the driver of our thoughts, but a monitor - an interpretation of our subconscious that feeds our model of how people think.

Not everybody is the same. We all have different temperaments. Some of us are less predictable than others, and we tend to avoid such people. Some are more amenable to co-operation, others are stubborn. To understand the temperament of one we must compare them to another. If we are to compare the model of another's mind to our own, and we simulate their mind as speech, then we must also simulate our own mind as speech. Then not only are we conscious, we are self-aware.

Add in a feedback loop of social norms, etiquette, acceptable behaviour, expected behaviour, cooperation and co-dependence, game theory and sustainable societies and this conscious model eventually becomes a lot more nuanced than it first started - allowing for abstract concepts such as empathy, shame, guilt, remorse, resentment, contempt, kinship, friendship, nurture, pride, and love.

Consciousness is magical, but not magic.

"Just filtered blood" is misleading. It's filtered, PROCESSED, blood.

This is like saying plants are just dirt, air, and water. While technically true, the biological processes in plant growth (as with milk production) create complex nutritive molecules out of simple constituents.

@newtboy

"saying humans are born with either a penis or vagina isn't a hateful statement against people."
It absolutely is hateful to hermaphrodites, clearly saying they aren't human. Use the qualifier "usually" or "almost always".

Alright, if used to deliberately dehumanise someone, almost anything can be hateful. Omitting "almost always" is just convenient, like stating the sky is blue. Sure, the sky isn't always blue, but it's correct often enough to be treated as an accurate general statement. As I gave in my example, saying humans have five fingers and five toes isn't hateful or dehumanising to people with a different number, it's just a generally true statement.

I argue it's in the brain, which today can't be changed. Gender is different from sexuality, clearly, no?

Let me try to be more succinct.

Physical sex is a birth attribute, not as my opinion, but as a provable objective fact.

Gender is in the brain, is an opinion. I do not share that opinion. This is a point on which we should have the liberty to agree to disagree.
Edit:My opinion is that if not defined as biological sex, gender has no real meaning aside from societal norms.

Do you recall the day you chose to be heterosexual? ;-)

While far from settled, there are indications sexual orientation may be genetically influenced at least, if not genetically determined.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/speculative-genetic-link-to-homosexuality-found

There's more conclusive evidence of a genetic component to transsexuality.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_transsexuality

There is plenty of employment law that says that there is an objective correct answer.

It is very frustrating to get into the conversation over and over again, meet the intellectual points with reason, and be dismissed.

Until men -- and they are mostly men -- step up to the plate and acknowledge that their biological responses are a problem that relegate women to pieces of meat for their pleasure, this will never be addressed in a way that lets us move forward.

It is akin to racism. I'm a racist. I have racist responses that are a combination of what I was brought up with (thanks, dad) and are part and parcel of how human's brains evolved.

We evolved to quickly see difference.

Helped us survive, that lightning quick assessment.

But racism is purely BELIEVING that lizard brain reaction is based in something real and should be given precedence over the frontal cortex.

Racism and sexism are related. They put lizard brain over the frontal cortex.

Just because you feel it doesn't mean it should be indulged.

And there is plenty of equal opportunity laws on the books to say that subjective racist responses, while endemic in humanity, shall not be allowed in a modern society.

We are struggling as humans to rise above the muck of biology. Wanna join me?

I just now saw this. My yahoo email account sometimes disappears things on me. I lost another email about the same time.

I absolutely agree with everything you say. Biology is biology. There are differences. Sex is in the workplace, of course, and women bring it there.

I can agree with all these things, and still be creeped out by the indulgence, the wallowing, of only hiring very attractive women.

There is a long history of that in America, and it was creepy then, too. Stewardesses and what they were subjected to in the workplace is a great example. They would lose their -- THEIR WORK -- if they gained five pounds, is an example of really inappropriate use of a woman's appearance as a job qualification. These people are responsible for the safety of the passengers if a tragedy strikes. I love reading stories about how women are heroes and professional when an accident happens.

A shooting range is not a strip club. Wanting to be surrounded by women in your business who COULD work in a strip club is creepy.

Creepy really isn't the right word. It is shorthand for a complex interplay of gender roles and abuses and complicity that is endemic in our culture. I just like the way it feels in my mouth -- I found that Japanese word for it that perfectly explains my pleasure in using it. I am still pleased to know that word exists.

Gitaigo: Onomatopoeia that describes states of being, not sounds.

Creepy perfectly feels like my state of being around this video.

We are all biological beings who like to look at pretty people. Tall men make more money. Attractive people of both genders make more money. We will never be free from those responses.

But lets keep it unconscious, shall we? Let us work to be better human beings than people who reduce ourselves to walking genitalia looking for constant stimulation.

The rest of your points... yeah. I'm right with you. I am not someone who criticizes men for "looking." I find myself looking and I'm pretty firmly on the hetero side of things.

It came up the other day on a hike through the woods. A woman passed me wearing some sort of body hugging stretch pants. There was natural jiggling from her movements, which caught my eye. I found myself staring, I became aware of how perfectly proportioned she was, and how the rest of her was lovely in every aspect (I had seen her a few moments before, walking in a different direction.) I almost called out to my friends -- my god, that is the most beautiful woman. All triggered by a chance glance at an objectively beautiful rear-end.

Biology. It happens. I have no problem with it.

And those shooting range owners want to stimulate that reaction in the workplace, 100% of the time. And that, my friend, is creepy.

I wish I had had these animations when I was taking biology. All of those terms were slightly familiar, but I only studied isolated still images without really knowing how they go together.

Oh my, suddenly all my biology classes came rushing back all at once.

Most all of Veritasium's videos are good, but this one especially so I think.

Whoever is at the cross-section between the comprehension of the biology behind this, and the direction of the visuals, is really gifted.

Double-Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Thursday, November 16th, 2017 9:50pm PST - doublepromote requested by oritteropo.

Evo-Devo (Despacito Biology Parody) | A Capella Science has been added as a related post - related requested by oritteropo.

*related=https://videosift.com/video/Evo-Devo-Despacito-Biology-Parody-A-Capella-Science (about the atoms, molecules, and cells making up creatures or people)
*doublepromote

Exactly. I see a phrase all the time:

'If there are aliens in our galaxy, why haven't we detected evidence of them?'

Perhaps because they are so different from what we even recognize as life that we don't even know what we are looking for. Perhaps the use of radio waves to communicate is something they haven't done in so long, that using it to send a message in space is unfathomable. Or perhaps they never even used that technology in the first place. It's possible that their own physiology would make such technology pointless.

The point is, we're looking for them in very human ways and expecting something very human to come back. Perhaps a civilization at a stage similar to ours out there is asking the same question and using a technology to search that we ourselves have no understanding of. They could be our galactic neighbors and our differing biologies and technology could be so different, that wouldn't even recognize each other as life.

On the flip side of that coin, I once had a UFO experience that was anything but 'lights in the night sky' and the object did things our planes couldn't hope to do. So who knows, maybe they are already here.

Fair enough, but these are separate issues, I agree with the premise of the video. But, while it would be a mistake to assume that men cannot be victims of abuse, it would also be a mistake to assume general equivalency. Take, Weinstein for example. Once he'd isolated his victims, they had to handle their situation with the added fear that he may physically overpower and rape them. With the gender roles reversed, the situation would in most cases not be the same. There is an extra dimension that needs to be considered resulting from the biological fact that men are bigger and stronger than women. I believe you do need to consider gender, even though it would be nice if you didn't.

I thought this would be right up your alley, it's an anti-Trump educated black man going against big corporations. (The speaker, never mind the conference he's at)

I have to say I don't agree with about the first 20 minutes of what he's talking about because it kind of assumes that early humans hunted and lived alone, but of course we know humans at least lived in small tribes.

But the biological stuff was quite interesting.

Laffer is to economics what Lamarck is to biology.

He deserves to end his days screeching "HEIL REAGAN!" and "The Democrats will hang you one day!" like some latter-day GOP-branded Julius Streicher.