On Fri, Oct 05, 2012 at 06:59:11PM -0700, meekerdb wrote: > On 10/5/2012 6:48 PM, Russell Standish wrote: > >On Fri, Oct 05, 2012 at 06:32:21PM -0700, meekerdb wrote: > >>Do we have any reason to believe ideas reproduce with variation and > >>then those that reproduce most successfully rise to consciousness? > >>THAT would be a Darwinian theory of consciousness. > >> > >>Brent > >Dennett's pandemonium theory would seem to be like that. > > I don't think Dennett contemplated sexual reproduction of ideas.
That's irrelevant. Plenty of biological life reproduce asexually. > > >Of course, > >there must be differences in the details between conscious thought and > >biological evolution - for example, thought may well be Lamarckian in > >character (like cultural evolution). > > The 'natural selection' that acts on ideas is mainly consilience > with other ideas that are already occupying brain resources. > I'm not convinced one way or other by this. I suspect we still don't know enough to say. Nevertheless, in the pandemonium model, there is a selection process of some sort going on. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
