OK, nice, that's a prediction that can be tested. That's getting somewhere.
I would bet a significant sum on your prediction being false. A color blind
animal would not spontaneously be able to see color, no matter how hungry
it was.

Anyway, you didn't address my concern about being able to posit evolution
in the first place based on first principles. Evolution requires death and
reproduction, neither of which follow from the statement that only
consciousness exists.

For that matter, neither does language. Where does language come from?  I
know you're going to say evolution, and then I'm going to remind you that
evolution doesn't follow from your theory, that you have to assume it. And
then once you assume it, you contradict your statement that only
consciousness exists.



On Wed, May 1, 2019 at 3:16 PM 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List <
everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:

> Talking about consciousness itself is a post-hoc statement. Even
> formulating the sentence "Consciousness is all there is." is a post-hoc
> statement that is created out of words that are highly contingent entities.
> So where do you draw the line between what is admitted to be considered
> "first principles" and what not ?
> I don't consider the evolutionary aspect of consciousness to be post-hoc.
> Actually, I consider that even if we didn't have the idea of evolution in
> our culture, we would have still arrived at it solely by looking at qualia,
> though most likely much slower. I think that even if you are to take some
> humans  and isolate them in a totally artificial environment, without
> plants and animals from which to derive the idea of evolution, they would
> ultimately still arrive at the idea of evolution merely by paying careful
> attention to their qualia. One way to do this is to notice that
> intellectual qualia always have the form of answers to questions. We are
> always first in a consciousness state that we can call a question ("What
> should I eat today ?"), and then that conscious state leads to another
> state called "answer" ("I will eat some fries."). Starting from this aspect
> of consciousness, namely that the quale "I will eat some fries." appears as
> a consequence of the quale "What should I eat today ?" will make those
> isolated people getting to the idea that all qualia should have appeared
> this way, and since it wasn't them that asked the question whose answer was
> the quale of red, then it must have been someone else that did it. And
> therefore, with clearly considerably more difficulties than us, will arrive
> at the theory of evolution.
>
> Now, you also mention the fact that evolution requires time. And my
> response to this is that indeed this is how it appears. But the fact that
> time is just a quale in consciousness, implies that we currently don't
> understand evolution properly, not that what I'm saying about consciousness
> is wrong. Actually, it might even be the case that those isolated people
> from the above example, would arrive at a better understanding of evolution
> than us. And then, if they were to be brought to Earth and showed them the
> plants and the animals, they will say: "Ah... but of course!... this is
> just a special case of evolution.". It is possible that we are being
> mislead into believing that evolution is something else than it actually
> is, because of the too many details that we have access to. A more purified
> view would show us a different view of evolution. And indeed I'm working on
> this, on trying to understand what exactly evolution is if you take out the
> physical time.
>
> Making a prediction: An animal that only sees shades-of-gray that is about
> to die of starvation, will bring into existence the qualia of red and green
> in order to see the food.
>
> On Wednesday, 1 May 2019 21:05:30 UTC+3, Terren Suydam wrote:
>>
>> You have no principled basis on which to make claims about evolutionary
>> dynamics of any kind. It's a post-hoc, just-so justification of the kinds
>> of qualia that we experience. Evolution doesn't follow in the slightest
>> from your first principles, which is merely that consciousness is all that
>> exists. Evolution depends on some kind of objective state-of-affairs that
>> exists outside of an individual consciousness, because in order for those
>> dynamics to work, some consciousnesses must persist and some must perish.
>> Also, you keep claiming that time doesn't exist (ok by me) but evolution
>> requires time.
>>
>> Make one prediction about new kinds of qualia that will emerge based on
>> your so-called evolutionary dynamics or whatever. Come on Cosmin Camping,
>> you can do it!
>>
>> --
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