On 2/3/2015 10:00 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
>> If consciousness was just a lucky accident Evolution would ensure
that it
didn't exist for long.
> Only if it cost something to maintain consciousness
Not so. Mutations happen all the time and nearly all of them are harmful. In most
animals If a mutation happens that renders it blind that will be a severe handicap and
the animal will not live long enough to pass that mutated gene onto the next generation;
but if it happens in a cave creature it's no handicap at all and so it will get into the
next generation, the end result is that cave creatures are not only blind they don't
even have eyes, and yet they survive just fine.
But it is biologically costly to make and maintain eyes.
In the same way if consciousness wasn't a byproduct of intelligence and instead was just
something tacked on that didn't effect behavior (and of course renders the Turing Test
ineffective) then a creature with a mutation that stopped the consciousness mechanism
from working would survive just as well as one without the mutation.
But maybe it was "tacked" on to integrate information processing from different
independent modules, e.g. vision, language, touch,... which in different developmental
path, say AI, might have been organized in a hierarchy or unified from the start. The
latter might even be more efficient, but evolution can't go back and start over, it can
only take small steps of improvement.
Pretty soon nobody would be conscious, but I know for a fact that at least one is. So
either Darwin was wrong or consciousness is a byproduct of intelligence. I don't think
Darwin was wrong.
>> So carbon atoms are conscious but silicon atoms are not. Well... I
can't prove that's wrong but I really
think it is.
> If you think atoms are conscious you're more mystic than Bruno.
You're the one who was talking about a special connection between carbon and
consciousness not me.
I said carbon based life-forms, not carbon atoms. I'm sure we both agree that
intelligence and consciousness come from the organization of atoms.
Brent
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