On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 2:07 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
>> 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. > Even if the cost was zero they would not keep those eyes for long because there would no evolutionary pressure to do so. So random mutation would ensure that they didn't.. Biologists even use something like this to estimate how long ago 2 species had a common ancestor. Mutations happen at a known statistical rate and some of the DNA in the gnome doesn't code for genes or regulate genes or do anything except duplicate itself, so they look at this non-coding DNA in the 2 species and see how different it is, the bigger the difference the older the common ancestor must have been. This won't work for the parts of DNA that code for genes because it changes much more slowly than the non-coding DNA does and the changes that do happen don't occur at a constant rate, lots of other thing besides the mutation rate come into play. And are you suggesting that this consciousness mechanism at work in biological brains operates on zero energy and no tissue needs to be made for it and thus the consciousness mechanism has zero biological cost? > But maybe it [consciousness] 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. Maybe I'm wrong but to me that all seems pretty contrived and intended to show that humans are superior, but it doesn't work because if true humans are doomed to be intellectually inferior to computers because their brain is organized in a fundamentally inferior way. And it gives credence to what I said before, it's not important if humans believe computers are conscious, the important thing is if computers think humans are conscious. John K Clark > > > 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. > > 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. > -- 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.
