On Sat, Nov 29, 2025 at 5:42 PM Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote:
*> do you have a sharp dividing line between conscious and unconscious? * > *No, that's why I can't remember my exact instant of consciousness before I fell asleep last night. * *>> I'm not going to give you a definition because any definition I give >> you would be made of words, and I have no doubt you would demand a further >> definition of at least one of those words, and round and round we'd go. But >> there is something much better than a definition, an example; a rock is not >> intelligent, Albert Einstein was, and a bacteria is somewhere between those >> two extremes. * > > > *And doesn't exactly the same assertion serve as an example of > consciousness? * > *Yes.* > *> yet intelligence and consciousness aren't the same thing.* > *But you can't have one without the other.... probably. You definitely can't have intelligence without consciousness, maybe you could have consciousness without intelligence, but I doubt it. * * >> I do not know what "physical likeness" means, at least not the way you >> seem to be using the term. Please enlighten me. * > > > *> Better I'll give you and example. Albert Einstein was physically like > me and a rock is not.* > *I agree that physically you're more like Einstein than you are to a rock, but most rocks contain all the elements that your body contains, so you are not completely dissimilar. And the genome of a banana is 60% like your genome, does that mean a banana is 60% as conscious as you are? Maybe, but I doubt it, and it certainly is not 60% as intelligent. * *>>>> that's the only way Darwinian natural selection could ever have >> produced consciousness, and I know for a fact that it did.* >> > > > * >>> You can't even get your inferences consistent.* >> > *>>Please point out my error. * > > *> Here's the Venn diagram (conscious (intelligence)) of "...intelligence > implies consciousness (3 lines above). Yes,..." But earlier (line 5, > 11/28/2025 1326) you wrote, "**...if consciousness wasn't an inevitable > byproduct of intelligence..." implying the Venn diagram (intelligence > (consciousness)). To believe both is to assert they are identical, which I > doubt. * > *First of all, when I say "intelligent" I mean "intelligent behavior" because behavior is the only way we can judge if something is intelligent or not. Maybe rocks are smarter than Einstein but are shy and don't like to brag so they stay quiet, but I doubt it. And I insist that intelligence implies consciousness but I don't insist that consciousness implies intelligence, although I think it very likely. And if X implies Y and Y implies X then X and Y may not be identical but they are logically equivalent. * > *>> I sincerely believe it is nonsense to try to specify where a mind is >> located because that can only be done with a noun, and you are not a noun, >> you are an adjective, you are the way that matter behaves when it is >> organized in a Brentmeekerian way. Right now there is only one chunk of >> matter in the observable universe that is organized in that way, but that >> need not always be the case. * > > *> So you think the same mind can be located two different places at the > same time. * > *I think that a brain always has a definite position but a mind does not, and a mind is what a brain does so it doesn't even make sense to ask where a mind is located. It would be like asking, where is the location of "rapid"? And if 2 brains are identical then there is only one mind. * > * > Can it be thinking two different thoughts? * > *I don't know what the referrent to the pronoun "it" in the above is but if 2 brains are thinking different thoughts then they are no longer identical, and so there are 2 minds.* *> your* thought is localized in *your* brain *It is an undisputed fact that your brain is localized inside of a box made of bone, but do you THINK that THOUGHT a lot? For most of human history people didn't even THINK a brain had anything to do with THOUGHT, the ancient Egyptians carefully preserved every part of the body except for the brain, they THOUGHT it was just uninteresting goo and threw it away. If you THINK a THOUGHT is not in your brain then how can a THOUGHT that you're THINKING be in your brain? * *>> Asking where a mind is located is like asking where yellow or fast or >> big is located. * > > *> Those are attributes of things,* > *Yes exactly, and mind is also the attribute of a thing, a brain. A mind is what a brain does and thus is not a thing, it is an attribute of a thing. And despite what your third grade English teacher may have told you, the word "I" is not a personal pronoun, it is not a noun of any sort, it is an adjective that describes what a particular brain is doing. If 2 brains are doing the same thing then there is only one "I".* * John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>* 4v[ -- 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 [email protected]. 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