On 06 Oct 2012, at 04:55, Russell Standish wrote:
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.
This is an open problem to me. Even bacteria exchange genetic
materials, and even bacteria which don't practice sex, get their
genetic material exchanged through virus.
And I don't know if Dennett contemplated sexual reproduction of ideas,
but I like to see dialog and exchange of ideas as a form of sexual
reproduction, even if it is more sophisticated than crossing over,
mutation, or typical low level exploitation of code.
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.
I agree. In arithmetic too. And consciousness is the main selector
there. It makes physics evolving like biology, except that the context
is a logico-arithmetical setting, instead of a space-time.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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