On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote: > I don't really understand why you insist that intelligence is a harder > problem than consciousness.
As I've said many times and people just shrug off, Evolution figured out how to make a brain that produces intense emotion about 500 million years ago but it only figured out how to make intelligence, the sort of intelligence that we're proud of, a few hundred thousand years ago. The facts are undeniable, either Charles Darwin was wrong or consciousness is a byproduct of intelligence. And I don't think Charles Darwin was wrong. > > I think we have very solid hypothesis on why some things behave > intelligently, you explained it yourself. > We know why Evolution produced intelligence but not how. I explained why Evolution selects for intelligence but does not select for consciousness, but If I knew the General Theory of Intelligence I'd be the richest man who ever lived, and I'm not. On the other hand just about everybody on this list has their own personal General Theory of Consciousness, and they're all different and they all work equally well; in other words they're all equally useless. > > We know nothing about consciousness So you're saying that after all the verbiage written about it on this list and all the electrons that have given their lives to discuss this subject on the internet the end result is that nobody knows anything or has anything of interest to say about consciousness. Well that doesn't sound too far from the truth to me, so maybe that means its time to think about something else. > >> as I said before, I personally would not work fine if I thought I was >> the only conscious being in the universe >> >> > > Ok, but please notice -- this is exactly the same reason a lot of people > claim for being religious. That they couldn't face life without god. > Very true, and that would be a very good reason to believe in God with the truth of the matter being irrelevant. If someone really could not function without the belief in God (I doubt that many people actually fall into that category, but never mind) then the logical thing to do would be to believe in God even though that belief is false. And in a similar way it's logically possible that I am the only conscious being in the universe, but it would be foolish of me to believe that is actually the case because that would render me non functional. And I think the same would be true of you unless you really are a intelligent zombie. John K Clark -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
