On 26 Nov 2014, at 23:34, meekerdb wrote:
On 11/26/2014 9:53 AM, John Clark wrote:
No that is not fine. I DEFINE intelligence just as everybody else
does, the ability to find novel solutions to new problems, the
greater the variety of problems the greater the intelligence. I
DEDUCE that if intelligent beings can be non-conscious then Darwin
was wrong. My OPINION is that Darwin was not wrong.
I don't think that deduction is unqualifiedly valid. First,
evolution permits what Gould called "spandrels". I don't think
human consciousness is a spandrel, but it's possible. Second, there
may be different ways of being intelligent (as game theorists will
play NIM differently from most people) and human consciousness
necessarily accompanied human intelligence because of the precursors
(hominid intelligence) that evolution had to start with. For
example, I think human consciousness and intelligence are both
closely linked to language. Language is an evolutionarily useful
adaptation of social animals. But I see no reason that no-social
animals cannot be intelligent (e.g. ocotopi are solitary by are the
most intlligent non-vertebrates). This implies that there can be
intelligent beings without language and therefore without anything
like human-consciousness; although they would have consciousness in
Bruno's sense of "being aware".
OK. I see consciousness being very close to the "simple" belief that
there is a reality. This is equivalent to belief in self-consistency,
and by the second incompleteness, such a belief is not justifiable by
the entity. So I see consciousness as an elementary mystical state,
where we have vision and interpret it as showing the existence of
something without being able to prove or justify that existence.
Yet this is what gives the meaning or the semantic of the proposition
that the machine can made.
Intelligence is more like a *disposition* making it possible to
develop some competence to act on, or change, that reality. A crow is
said intelligent because they can use tools to extract some food from
a recipient, and adapt the tools with respect to the recipient. But a
bird which cannot do that intelligent task, can still be as much
conscious than the crow. It just does not get the right ideas, perhaps
it has not the patience, or it has not enough memories, but it
believes as much as the crow in some reality around them.
Bruno
Brent
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