On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 10:32 AM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
> I agree with all you say, except the implication of the last sentence: that > evolution would never produce results with some inessential side effect. > First, evolution has to produce things by evolving - not starting from a > clean sheet. In the case of consciousness I think it quite likely that this > happened. Conscious thinking is similar to talking-to-yourself because > evolution happened to take advantage of auditory processing of language to > internalize symbolic cogitation. Second, even though the same result might > be obtained in some other way, it might be less efficient in some sense to > do so. We might conceivably make a human-acting robot that cogitated using > a computer separate from the one used for processing language and while I > think it would be conscious, it would be conscious in a different way. The most plausible explanation is that consciousness is a necessary side-effect of the type of information processing that goes at its simplest stimulus->response->behaviour modification. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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.
