On Fri, Apr 30, 2021 at 3:43 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List < everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:
*> It [consciousness] could be the inevitable byproduct of the only path > open to evolution. Evolution has to always build on what has already been > evolved. So what was inevitable starting with ATP->ADP or RNA or DNA, > might not be inevitable starting with silicon or gallium.* I don't see how it could have anything to do with the particular elements involved, however I agree evolution has serious flaws that closes off many paths to intelligence, the most serious (but not the only) flaw is that evolution doesn't understand the concept of two steps forward one step back. A human designer could look at the design for a prop airplane engine and decide it is insufficient and throw the design away and start over from scratch and design a jet engine, but evolution could never do something like that. Every major change that evolution makes to a species is the result of thousands of tiny changes over millions of generations of animals, and every one of those thousands of tiny changes must give an immediate advantage to the animal. Evolution couldn't even fix a flat tire by taking it off and putting on the spare because once you've removed the flat you've temporarily made the situation even worse because now you have no tire at all. Nevertheless despite these very serious flaws evolution managed to produce an intelligence, and one that happened to be conscious too. So it must be easier to make an intelligent conscious mind than an intelligent unconscious mind, so logically your default assumption on seeing an intelligent computer should be that it's conscious, the burden of proof should be on proving that it was not. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv0G%2BCrijtPsqArsVbg5PMi6YgK%3DYLaMi0HzQdNt-Tvx%2Bg%40mail.gmail.com.
