Hi Stathis Papaioannou Anything alive must have consciousness to some degree, so consciousness always was-- at least to a limited extent.
[Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 12/15/2012 "Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen ----- Receiving the following content ----- From: Stathis Papaioannou Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-12-14, 19:19:56 Subject: Re: Moral evaluations of harm are instant and emotional,brain study shows On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 11:47 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote: ? I don't see how you can come to that conclusion. There is nothing in what I feel that would provide me with any certainty that my brain is not being manipulated by someone by remote control, for example. That possibility is entirely?onsistent?ith my subjective feeling of freedom. Of course that's possible. In fact it is a common psychotic delusion. Indeed, we are complex and have many competing aspects of our self with different agendas. The reason why it doesn't make sense however, is why would any process exist which creates an epiphenomenal person such as you. By extension, that is the problem with mechanism and functionalism as well. If you have a perfectly good computer which operates a robot navigating a physical world whose purpose is to survive and reproduce, what would be the advantage of generating an internal representation delusion to some made up 'person' program when the computer is already controlling the robot perfectly well. It would be like installing an chip inside of your computer to simulate an impressionist painter who actually paints tiny paintings for a made up audience of puppets to think that they are looking at. Even then, you still have the Explanatory Gap/homunculus problem. You still ARE NO CLOSER to closing the gap as now you have an interior 'model' which has no mechanism for perception. You have just moved the Cartesian Theater inside of biochemistry, but it still explains nothing about how you get from endogenous light to endogenous eyes which see images through biophotons rather than are simply informed of their quantitative significance directly and digitally. You have just presented an argument for why consciousness is a necessary side-effect of intelligent behaviour. If it were not so, then there would have been no reason for consciousness to have evolved. ? -- 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. -- 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.
