On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 11:26:43 PM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: > > On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 10:32 AM, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net<javascript:>> > wrote: > > > I agree with all you say, except the implication of the last sentence: > that > > evolution would never produce results with some inessential side effect. > > First, evolution has to produce things by evolving - not starting from a > > clean sheet. In the case of consciousness I think it quite likely that > this > > happened. Conscious thinking is similar to talking-to-yourself because > > evolution happened to take advantage of auditory processing of language > to > > internalize symbolic cogitation. Second, even though the same result > might > > be obtained in some other way, it might be less efficient in some sense > to > > do so. We might conceivably make a human-acting robot that cogitated > using > > a computer separate from the one used for processing language and while > I > > think it would be conscious, it would be conscious in a different way. > > The most plausible explanation is that consciousness is a necessary > side-effect of the type of information processing that goes at its > simplest stimulus->response->behaviour modification. >
I find that the least plausible explanation. It means that if a billion people talk to each other and give each other information, that some kind of consciousness must necessarily arise as a side-effect. You could say that it might arise, but the idea that such a side effect is somehow necessary as to accomplish certain kinds of information processing is laughably romantic to my mind. If I recruit people to recruit people to all do math together, then a magical genie will appear. Necessarily. Because of behavior modification. Mm. Yeah. No ghost in the machine, but machine that runs on ghost power...because...why? Craig > > > -- > Stathis Papaioannou > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/g28MxofJyqQJ. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
