On Monday, September 3, 2012 4:37:54 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > On 02 Sep 2012, at 19:32, Craig Weinberg wrote: > > On Sunday, September 2, 2012 12:59:54 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: >> >> On 9/2/2012 5:01 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: >> >> >> >> On Saturday, September 1, 2012 12:43:50 PM UTC-4, Alberto G.Corona wrote: >>> >>> *Where is the revulsion, disgust, and blame - the stigma and >>> shaming...the deep and violent prejudices? Surely they are not found in the >>> banal evils of game theory. ** * >>> >>> In the book I referred, it is described the evolutionary role of >>> sentiments. Sentiments are the result of mostly unconscious processing. See >>> for example the cheating detection mechanism in this book, which has been >>> subject to an extensive set of test. and there are many papers about >>> cheater detection. cheater detection is a module of logical reasoning >>> specialized for situations where a deal can be broken. It exist because >>> cheater detection is critical in some situations and it must necessary to >>> react quickly. Its effect is perceived by the conscious as anger of fear, >>> depending on the situation. >>> >> >> That's not the point. It doesn't matter how tightly the incidence of >> sentiment or emotion is bound with evolutionary function, I would expect >> that given the fact of emotion's existence. The problem that needs to be >> answered is given a universe of nothing but evolutionary functions, why >> would or how could anything like an emotion arise? >> >> >> When an amoeba detects a gradient of salinity and moves in the less >> saline direction does it have a feeling? >> > > I imagine that it does. Not much like a feeling we could relate to as > human beings, but there is an experience there and it has more qualitative > depth to it than when a steel needle interacts with a gradient of salinity, > but less depth than when an animal's tongue encounters salinity. > > > I am kind of OK with this, but I tend to consider that amoeba have a > tongue; a one cell tongue which is itself. The amoeba has only one cell, so > that cell is simultaneously a muscle, a tongue, a neuron, a liver, a > digestive cells, even a sort of bone when the conditions are bad and that > the amoeba solidifies for a while. >
Exactly, although I tend to assume that the undifferentiated sense palette that corresponds to the undifferentiated utility of the amoeba body is qualitatively weaker than a large multicellular organism. There are other possibilities though, and it is even worse than pure speculation to try to guess since our own consciousness inherently prejudices our guesses. It could be the case that the amoeba's relative lack of structure allows it full access to more of the totality of all sense experience, that its every moment is poetry and symphony. It could also be the case that every amoeba in the universe is really the same amoeba experience. Or it could be that in the amoeba's universe it could be the human being and we are the petroleum deposits or whatever. I tend to go with an Occam's razor conservatism on this. While I feel like our naive realism overstates the unconsciousness of non-human entities, I tend to trust the panoramic spread of the continuum from inorganic structure to our own thoughts and feelings. I think that the relative distance in qualities we perceive between animals, amoeba, and rocks, is honoring an underlying reality, if not an absolute caste ranking. I think that one of the main advantages for single celled organisms to want to 'level up' to multicellular might in fact be for the better tasting food and the more exciting reproduction. > The amoebas lost universality and freedom when they developed the > collectivist quasi communist pluricellular organisations, known as > pluricellular organism, somehow. They even lost their potential immortality > except for some gamete cells. > Obviously, pluricellularity has strong local advantages, and you can't > stop evolution which takes advantage of any improvement of the economy. > Note that the unicellular organism have not disappeared, they are as much > successful with respect to evolution than us, and they have still some big > advantage for possible future environmental changes. If all mammals > disappear, the bacteria and amoebas will not care at all. If bacteria and > amoebas disappear, we disappear immediately. > I tend to agree, although this argument biases the bullet over the Bible. Bottom up process has it's trump card of material support, but Top down processes have the polar opposite sort of influence. The universe of cold hard facts could exist in theory without warm soft fiction, but in reality, that is not what we see. We see that fiction triumphs over fact all the time. We see people spend money on looking good instead of being healthy, or risking their lives to have an adventurous feeling, etc. So it is not clear that, especially if amoeba have sense in a more exotically rich manifestation than we might guess, that they would not miss higher organisms. We are their Colossus of Rhodes, their Pyramids, etc. Maybe. Or maybe without us, there is a 'disturbance in the force' which motivates the unicellular forms to rebuild these larger chunks...filled with ideas and cosmic novelty capital infusions from the collapse of the zoological experiment. Easy to guess, hard to believe one over the other. Craig > > Bruno > > > > > > Craig > > > >> >> Brent >> > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/P1BsfrVWQZIJ. > To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com<javascript:> > . > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > everything-li...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. > > > http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ > > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/ysNpu1Y9YUsJ. 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.
