John K Clark wrote:
...
I've been asking people with ideas like yours this question for
decades but
I've never received a straight answer, not one:
If intelligence is not always linked to consciousness then why on
Earth did
evolution produce it?
...
John K Clark [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Consciousness antedates intelligence ... at least to the extent that
they aren't co-evolved.
An amoeba is conscious of it's surroundings (before being taught!). It
has an instinctive (hardwired) choice to head towards certain stimuli
and away from others. This requires self-centered decision making,
which is the essence of consciousness. It could be done in a completely
hardwired fashion, but it wasn't. You can train an amoeba to avoid
certain stimuli which it naively sought. So it's conscious. If
intelligence is equivalent to trainability, then you could also argue
that it's minimally intelligent.
The interesting question is, as we proceed to simpler forms, where do
you stop calling this "decision making" conscious? (Or intelligent, if
that's your choice.) Very soon we come to a hardwired thermostat. It
senses it's environment and responds to it. Personally, I call this
minimally conscious and minimally intelligent. I can imagine arguments
for not considering it such, but I haven't found any that I consider
convincing. The case for not calling a thermostat intelligent seems a
trifle stronger than the case for not calling it conscious (as training
the thermostat involves modifying it's hardware [changing the position
of a dial]).
After the thermostat, we come to the pool-ball, which I would tend to
argue is neither conscious nor intelligent, based on their not making
choices that alter their internal reactions based on their environment
in normal circumstances. (Hitting a pool ball with a chisel driven by a
sledge hammer is not normal circumstances, and I would argue that the
result afterwards is no longer a pool ball.)
To my mind the thermostat is the minimal conscious entity. And possibly
just one step below the minimal intelligent entity. This enshrines
homeostasis as the most elementary form of intelligence, and the sensing
and evaluation involved in homeostasis as the most elementary form of
consciousness.
-------------------------------------------
singularity
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