On 10/16/2012 9:37 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 2:40 PM, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:>> If consciousness doesn't do anything then Evolution can't see it, so how and why did Evolution produce it? The fact that you have no answer to this means your ideas are fatally flawed.> I don't see this as a *fatal* flaw. Evolution, as you've noted, is not a paradigm of efficient design. Consciousness might just be a side-effectBut that's exactly what I've been saying for months, unless Darwin was dead wrong consciousness must be a side effect of intelligence, so a intelligent computer must be a conscious computer.
But it might be a side-effect of the particular way in which evolution implemented human intelligence. If we created an artificial intelligence that, for example had a module for filtering and storing information about significant events that was separate from the language/communication module then that AI might not be conscious in the way people are. I agree that it would be conscious in *some* way, but different ways of processing and storing information, even though they produce roughly the same intelligent behaviour, might produce qualitatively different consciousness. In fact I expect that cuttlefish, who are social and communicate by producing color patterns on their body, have a different kind of 'stream of consciousness' and if they evolved to be as intelligent as humans they would still have this qualitative difference in consciousness, somewhat as people with synasthesia do but more so.
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