Brad/Eugen/Ben,
Early living things/current simple-minded living things, we can conjecture
didn't/don't have perceptions that can be described as qualia. Then
somewhere along the line humans start describing perceptions that some of
them describe as qualia. It seems that something has happened in between.
My guess is that the precusor elements of brain processing that are now
described by some people as qualia probably emerged from two sources:
- accidental artifacts (eg. ??reverberation from processing subjective
experience?? the general case being artifacts that arise through
*imperfect* processing systems )
- positively selected 'design' solutions for advanced subjective
information processing in a setting of limited computational power
Advanced animals - especially social ones - play around with all the attributes
of their bodies - whether these attributes are under first-order evolutionary
selection. If animal groups develop a cultural trend around an accidental
attribute it might then start being selected for.
Take peacocks again. The colourful tails are presumably a "hey look at me'
flag. Sexual success will flow from better flags (more famboyant tails) but
also, presumably, from a higher state of excitement when seeing really flashy
tails. So the evolutionary arms race that is the peacock tail presumably will
drive changes in the flag (in the males) and changes in the preception system
(in the females) - this could be expected to lead to enhanced qualia
experience in the females. And since males and females share nearly the
same genome and largely similar development processes, its likely that the
male peacocks will get enhanced capacity for rich subjective exerience (ie
qualia-like perception) as a byproduct.
Anyway this is all rampant speculation on my part. :)
Cheers, Philip
-------
To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your
subscription,
please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
