On 09 Feb 2013, at 00:49, Craig Weinberg wrote:
Outside of consciousness, there is no possibility of discerning any
difference between accidental byproducts and selected products. Only
consciousness selects. Only consciousness has accidents.
Good point.
But this does not make consciousness a good fundamental concept to
which we can depart. With computaionalism the number are better.
Consciousness is when number relation supports local person's belief
in a reality or in a truth.
Bruno
Craig
On Friday, February 8, 2013 5:53:18 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
On 2/8/2013 10:49 AM, John Clark wrote:
I don't know what you mean by that, what I mean is that
consciousness is a spandrel, it is the unavoidable result of
intelligence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_%28biology%29
Or it could be an accidental byproduct of the way human intelligence
developed - unavoidable only in the sense that it was the only
reachable intelligent starting from hominds. Evolution can only
move species to local maxima of fitness.
In Roland Omnes recent book he imagines an alien race that has
enormous memory capacity, so that simply remember everything that
has happened and what was done and when the need to make a decision
they just do the thing that turned out best in the past. It's Omnes
caricature of Hume's theory of cause and effect. But his idea is
that such aliens wouldn't develop 'theories' as we do to summarize
past events. Would they be conscious? I don't know, but I'd guess
they wouldn't be conscious in the way I am (I don't remember what I
had for breakfast yesterday...but I have a theory).
Brent
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