On Sat, Aug 5, 2023 at 3:25 PM Alan Grayson <agrayson2...@gmail.com> wrote:
*> It's pretty clear, in fact obvious, that you regard other human beings > as conscious* YES. > > *for the reasons I stated.* NO. For thousands of years, long before anyone knew anything about Evolution or electronics or much of anything else people believed that their fellow human beings were conscious some of the time but not all of the time. They believed they were conscious when they were behaving intelligently but they did not believe their fellow human beings were conscious when they were sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because then they were not behaving intelligently. > *> But whatever Evolution did, it took billions of years.* That's because Evolution is ridiculously slow and clumsy but until it got around to inventing a brain it was the only way complex objects could get built. These days, ironically thanks to intelligent design, things happen much faster and they are about to happen even faster. > *> Claiming human computer scientists did something similar in a few > decades at most, is hugely implausible.* Hugely implausible or not, that is exactly precisely what is happening right before your eyes. I'm not a young man but I'm starting to think there is a good chance I will live long enough to personally experience the Singularity, and I wouldn't have said that six months ago. And I'm not sure that's a good thing because it might not be much fun. > > *What's hugely reasonable, is that something almost indistinguishable > from consciousness or intelligence has been created, but nothing more.* Do you believe the Pope when he says every Catholic Mass is able to magically turn bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ, not symbolically but literally, even though the bread and wine at the end of the silly religious ceremony is indistinguishable from what it was at the beginning? If you believe in the above voodoo about consciousness it's not much of a step to believe in the Pope's voodoo too. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> v0o > -- 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/CAJPayv0rK-JpFThd-oxjGOn2yFSOqi6938o31Q7RST3zKwxifA%40mail.gmail.com.
