On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 5:04 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:
I find it difficult to understand how you could be thinking about
these things. If I put atoms in the configuration of a duck but as you
claim I don't get a duck, I must have missed something out.
Because a duck's life is made of the lives of billions of duck cells, and it
is a fragment of the lives of all ducks. You are looking along the wrong
axis if you want to understand consciousness and feeling - it longitudinal
through time, not latitudinal across space. You are expecting any set of
atoms to have access to the emergent properties of all of biology, but that
is not necessarily the case at all. An experience can't be built out of
unconscious Legos, even if they are moving in some complex configuration. If
they could, don't you think that we might see some organism evolved to
exploit that? Wouldn't it be an obvious survival advantage for an organism
to carve it's genetic instructions into the sea floor where any future
creature could be impregnated just be scanning a their gastropod over a
rock?
Organisms do exploit the ability to repair and build parts, including
brain parts, from inanimate components, since that is a large part of
what metabolism involves. It took billions of years to evolve this
mechanism. Other mechanisms that might have been useful, such as
rifles to kill predators or prey from a distance, did not evolve.
However, intelligent creatures evolved with the ability to make tools
to do this. Intelligent creatures have also recently started making
tools that synthesise the components of life, such as an arbitrary
nucleotide or peptide sequence.
It doesn't work that way at all though, does it? Biology only ever uses
biological vehicles to carry its instruction set - literal pieces of itself
as a physically present zygote - no 'information', 'configurations', of
generic atoms seem to be capable of coming to life or gaining consciousness
ab initio.
Biological vehicles are machines that create replacement parts and
copies of themselves. You are begging the question if you say they are
not.
For if I
didn't miss anything anything out it would be a duck, right?
No, I don't think it would in reality. I understand exactly why in theory
most people think that it obviously would, but if I'm right about the
relation of life, consciousness, and matter, trying to build a living
organism from scratch with atoms will likely fail. The molecules need to
have been parts of a living cell, in the same way that you can't turn an
Amazon tribesman into a civil engineer without having some contact with
someone who has participated in Western civilization. There has to be a
willing integration of sense and motive.
If you tell an Amazon tribesman that you are going to put matter
together in the exact form of a jaguar he may well say that you will
get a jaguar, but a tribesman from a neighbouring tribe may say no,
because it will lack the jaguar spirit. You would go with the second
tribesman.
So
perhaps the atoms in the duck I made lack the capacity of awareness.
No, all atoms have the capacity for awareness...they *are* the capacity of
awareness on the atomic scale. On the human level they appear atomic but
natively there is only experience. The question if not whether atoms have
awareness or not is a Red Herring and a straw man. The better question is
why can't all atoms generate animal quality experiences. The answer to that,
I think, is that it is the quality of the experience which drives the
appropriate reflection as a public form. The cell is the footprint of the
cellular experience through time. The animal body is the corresponding home
for the animal experience.
Didn't you agree at one point that all atoms of a certain kind are identical?
Just as these words are the home of my intent to communicate, their
arrangement is composed directly by my intention (filtered through the
typos, errors, and constraints of language, grammar, keyboards and fingers,
brain, etc). These words are not appearing as letters on the screen as a
result of some biochemical process that happens to enjoy generating letters.
There is a whole elaborate network and history of inventions which have been
intentionally designed by people for this very purpose of expressing ideas.
The words and letters aren't just inert vehicles, they reflect sense back to
us in a different way - as the other..and that's what you are mistaking for
consciousness, IMO.
You're answering a different question to the one I posed. Not only is
it common sense, it is also an empirical fact in biology that if you
put the same matter in the same configuration you get something that
functions identically, regardless of the history of the matter, and
regardless of how it is put together. For example, artificial peptides
function the same as natural peptides. Given that their synthesis is
completely different, wouldn't you
