On Sat, Jun 21, 2014 at 10:02 PM, <ghib...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > We're arguably in the domain of Darwinian Evolution in this conversation That's because Darwinian Evolution produced the only thing that I am absolutely positively 100% certain is conscious. > > and in that domain there very strong reasons for me to think the > conscious experience I have is very similar to every human on the planet. > That sounds like a pretty good working hypothesis to me. > > with computing in which we can get a lot of properties we would have > associated with intelligence, where there is no evidence for consciousness. > I believe that evidence of intelligence is pretty good evidence of consciousness, if you believe otherwise then you have no reason to think any of your fellow human beings are conscious. > > We already know intelligence can come at different levels. > True without a doubt. > > We probably suspect so too can consciousness. > I know for a fact that my consciousness comes at different levels, it's at level zero (or nearly so) for 8 hours in every 24. > > So do you want to hear it? There's a long version and short version. > At the end of a letter to a friend the mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote: "sorry for such a long letter, if I had more time it would have been shorter". > > So the short version John, is look at your use of metaphor. Above you > use the word "See" [blah blah] > Metaphor my ass! It's a fact that however much we may value consciousness natural selection can't see it or hear it or touch it or detect it or be effected by it in any way, but natural selection can see or detect or be effected by behavior, and animals with intelligent behavior get more of their genes into the next generation than animals with less intelligent behavior. And it is beyond dispute that random mutation and natural selection managed to produce a conscious being at least once and perhaps billions of times, therefore it is logical for me to conclude that consciousness and intelligence are linked and consciousness is just the way data feels like when it is being processed. > > Your Proposition: Darwinian Natural Selection is a direct analogue of > the human difficulty to detect, distinguish, understand, human > consciousness. > Analogue my ass! And that is not my proposition, this is: If intelligent but non-conscious beings (or computers) were possible then there would be no conscious beings on planet Earth. And yet here I am. And even if by some miracle consciousness did exist it would soon fade away due to genetic drift just like the eyes of animals that have lived for many generations in pitch dark caves. The eyes of cave animals give them no survival value and the same is true of consciousness, therefore the only way to explain my own existence is to postulate that consciousness is a byproduct of intelligence, in particular intelligent behavior. > > Natural Selection is abstract that cannot even be placed in a particular > temporal setting. > Nonsense, the basic idea behind Natural Selection is about as down to earth and clear-cut as anything in science, and it's valid in any setting where entities reproduce with less than 100% fidelity, regardless of whether those entities are made or meat or silicon or even just consist of patterns in a computer memory. > Natrual Selection is an abstract because it doesn't tie to any specific "detection" medium, Nonsense, the medium is the gene pool and the detection method, that is to say how Natural Selection separates the winning genes from the losing genes, is the ubiquity of those genes in that gene pool. Natural selection can certainly detect if a behavior related gene lives long enough to get its genes into the next generation more often than a rival gene. And that's all you need to explain the evolution of intelligence. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
