On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 4:04 PM, John Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> 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,
John, I never shrugged off any of your ideas, I always considered them. Maybe you're projecting a bit? > 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 don't think Charles Darwin ever wrote anything about consciousness. Evolution is not a theory of consciousness. It's a theory on the origin of biological complexity. Again, you're creating a false dichotomy by using your dogma (not Darwin's) that consciousness arrises from intelligence. But borrowing Bruno's argument, will you be in Moscow or New York if you get duplicated? >> >> > 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. Oh we know a lot about how already. It's just harder to grasp if you reject emergence. > 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. I meant that we know nothing scientifically about consciousness. Possibly because it's a problem outside of the scope of science. This realisation is what makes me agnostic instead of atheist. >>> >>> >> 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. Ok. > 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. One possibility, of course, is that consciousness is the fundamental stuff. That doesn't change the fact that me, as a particular instantiation of that fundamental stuff, have a context and experiences. I want to avoid pain and seek pleasure. I don't see how believing in a single consciousness, for example, changes that. > 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 [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
