Nowhere does Pitkänen define consciousness. Nowhere does he give any evidence of his claim that consciousness has anything to do with phosphate bonds. His argument is that phosphate bonds store energy in living organisms, and that living organisms have higher temperature but lower entropy than their environment. Does that make any sense?
I assume he means the mysterious kind of consciousness, not the mental state of wakefulness. We call that phenomenal consciousness, or qualia, that which makes humans different from philosophical zombies. But the ONLY evidence for the existence of consciousness is your own sensation of it. There can be no other test because a zombie is DEFINED to be identical to a human by any observable test. So the only thing that needs explaining is this feeling that you are conscious. When you view an optical illusion, like a straight line that appears bent, you don't insist that the line is really bent until right before you put a straight edge against it. You accept a neurological explanation. You have neurons that respond to lines at various orientations, and they inhibit their neighbors. What you experience as consciousness is a mostly positive reinforcement signal associated with thinking, perception, and action. This signal exist to motivate you to not let these things stop by dying. It should be obvious why your brain evolved this way. I don't understand why we reject such an obvious explanation. Do you really believe there is a mysterious life force outside of physics that explains human behavior but not animal behavior? Or do you believe machine intelligence is possible? On Tue, Oct 8, 2019, 5:45 PM James Bowery <[email protected]> wrote: > I don't see Matt's "many worlds" view as incompatible with associating > consciousness with intelligence in the slightest. As for myself, I go > beyond that to see free will as an inevitable attribute of the existence of > consciousness. Of course, this gets into definitions wars which are > ultimately fruitless without recognizing them as such, as did Shane Legg, > so productively, in his PhD thesis. I don't really like arguing with > people in these areas when what is really needed is a Rosetta Table between > glossaries before dialogue is meaningful. > > On Tue, Oct 8, 2019 at 3:33 PM John Rose <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Few are at Pitkänen's level IMO. I find it incredibly stimulating reading >> his stuff... Depends on your interests. >> >> I still don't understand why though many researchers have an almost >> irrational fear of associating consciousness with intelligence and reject >> anyone that publishes in that direction... >> > *Artificial General Intelligence List <https://agi.topicbox.com/latest>* > / AGI / see discussions <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi> + > participants <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/members> + delivery > options <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription> Permalink > <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T8eabd59f2f06cc50-Mbb3f57b5c9c9d112162222f0> > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T8eabd59f2f06cc50-Mac73021085930706ed03eb1d Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
