On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 6:56 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
> > I don't agree with John that intelligence is necessarily accompanied by > human-like consciousness. His argument is based on evolution, i.e. that if > intelligence could exist without consciousness then it would evolved that > way. But evolution can be driven by historical accident. > If Evolution just stumbled onto consciousness because a astronomically unlikely mutation occurred and not because it was the byproduct of intelligence then it would be of neutral survival value and the human race would have lost that property long ago by genetic drift. That's the reason creatures that have lived in dark caves for thousands of generations have no eyes; elsewhere a mutation that rendered a creature blind would be a disaster but in a pitch dark cave it wouldn't hinder its genes getting into the next generation at all. In fact lack of eyes would be a advantage, all the resources needed to make a complex organ like the eye could be directed into something more useful, like having more offspring. There are only 2 options, consciousness improves the survival of a organism or it does not, lets examine both possibilities. If consciousness improves survival it can only do so by effecting the behavior of the animal and then we must conclude that the Turing Test works for consciousness as well as intelligence. If on the other hand consciousness does not effect behavior then it MUST be a byproduct of something else that does (like intelligence) or Evolution would never have produced it and never have kept it even if it had, and yet I know for a fact Evolution HAS produced consciousness at least once (me) and probably many billions of times. 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.
