On 9/24/2014 6:53 PM, John Clark wrote:
On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 5:52 PM, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>> John argues that consciousness has real world consequences in
terms of
being evolutionary selected
>> Either that or consciousness is the side effect of something else
that has
real world consequences; if Darwin was right it can't be any other way.
> You keep saying this. You also like to say things like "consciousness is
how
information feels when it's being processed". I like that idea. It shows
that you
can indeed consider alternatives to the binary choice above. In this case
evolution
created a very complex scenario for conscious to feel when being processed.
But it
did not create consciousness,
Evolution is only interested in intelligent behavior because only that and not
consciousness helps get genes into the next generation. So how did consciousness manage
to produce at least one being (me) that's conscious? There are only 2 possibilities:
1) Perhaps consciousness aids in producing intelligent behavior. If this is true then it
would be easier to make a intelligent computer that was conscious than to make a
Intelligent computer that was not conscious. It would also mean that the Turing Test is
not only a test for intelligence but was also a good (although not infallible) test for
consciousness too.
2) The only way to produce intelligent behavior is to process information, and perhaps
it's just a brute fact that consciousness is how information feels when it's being
processed.
In my opinion #2 is more likely than #1 but if Darwin was right then one of the two must
be true, But either way consciousness must be a biological spandrel, and if you ever run
across a smart computer you can conclude that it's probably conscious too.
I think #1 is more likely, so long as we identify consciousness with what we experience,
e.g. imaging, inner narrative, language (does anybody here think they could formulate and
understand Lob's theorem without language?). #2 is is probably true in the sense that
some kind of consciousness goes with intelligent information processing. But I think there
are probably a wide range of different ways to do intelligent information processing and
they may give rise to different kinds of consciousness (e.g. the hive mind of the Borg)
that would be hard for us to recognize in interacting with them.
Of course these are probably all equivalent under Bruno's idea that consciousness is just
being a universal computer and so babies and trees and genome's are conscious too. But I
think that's so broad a concept of consciousness as to be obfuscatory.
Brent
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