On Jan 15, 1:51 pm, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 4:39 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>wrote: > > >If consciousness has a survival value [...] > > Then consciousness must change behavior and the Turing Test works for > consciousness as well as intelligence .
Consciousness can change behavior but it might not have to. Like a possum can play dead. But a dead possum can't play live. Think of consciousness as the yellow traffic light. When the light is green or red, the outcome is deterministic. You stop and wait or go forward. Whether the light happens to be green or red is random relative to the driver's interaction, but deterministic relative to the traffic signaling grid. The yellow light is different. It addresses the driver directly to be alert and use your judgment. You decide whether to slow down or not. Whether you do slow down or not is random relative to the traffic signal but signifying and participatory to the driver. > > > then surely omniscience, teleportation, or the ability to turn into a > > diamond on command would have an even greater survival value. > > Yes, and if random mutation and natural selection could have produced any > of those things (except perhaps for the diamond thing, the survival value > is not obvious) If you could turn into a diamond and back on command, you would be pretty much predator-proof. My point though is that all of these things - teleportation, diamond impersonation, etc are no less unlikely than consciousness. Much more likely really, since they are only variations on reality, not an entirely unprecedented ontology that somehow enters reality. There is no way that mutation could produce that unless those things were already possible to produce. It's like saying a musical instrument suddenly begins producing a color instead of a sound. It's just magical thinking dressed up as 'evolution'. Life has no reason to evolve from non-life. Minerals can't suddenly need to 'survive' - whatever that would mean to minerals. > in the 3 billion years available we would indeed have those > abilities but apparently they were too hard to produce. It's begging the question. How can mutation produce consciousness if consciousness was not already a potential? Your answer is that it must have since consciousness exists and evolution is responsible for all properties of life. But my whole point is that awareness is inherent, and only the content and quality of it evolves. If a creature has a beak, then evolution can give it's children a longer beak, but it can't give it a magic beak that creates other worlds in midair. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
