On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 9:39 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
>> If consciousness does not effect intelligent behavior and if Darwin's >> Theory is correct then there is no alternative, consciousness is a >> spandrel. >> > > That assumes human beings and human evolution - and I agree with that > application. But it does not show that intelligence could not evolve > without human-like consciousness > Human-like consciousness? I don't see how you can speak for all humans, the only type of consciousness I have first hand experience with is John Clark-like consciousness. > which I take to be a inner narrative. > A big part, perhaps the only part, of Intelligence is planing for the future: if this happens then I will do that but otherwise I will do that other thing. How could a computer or a person do that without a inner dialog? > Language is auditory. > Not always. The language skill you're demonstrating this very second isn't auditory it's visual, you don't even know what my voice sounds like but we're having a conversation nevertheless. > Abstract ideas can be represented in images > Just like Egyptian hieroglyphics or the sign language that the deaf use. > or (per Bruno) numerical relations. > As in the language of mathematics. > An intelligent might think in three dimensional patterns and not > something one-dimensional like language. > And when you read a book you can skip large sections, go back and reread something, or go the very end and see how it all turned out before you even know how it started. > You imply that any representation is language > No not anything, only representations that have a grammar that allows ideas of arbitrary complexity and abstraction to be compactly depicted is a language. A grunt is a representation of pain but without grammar pain is the only information that is conveyed but "my finger hurts because I hit it with a hammer while I was helping my friend build his house to replace the one the burned down two days ago" uses grammar and contains vastly more information than the grunt. And by the way, the preceding sentence is probably the first time in human history that anyone has written those particular words in that exact sequence, but people have grunted lots of times. > There are encryption systems that provide for computations to be > performed on data and results returned with ever decrypting the data; so > the part of the system doing the calculation never receives any > "communication" that has meaning to it. > But the part of the system wanting the computation to be done knows what it means and so does the part that uses the output; the part doing the calculation doesn't know what it means and the part that knows what it means doesn't know how the calculation was done; it's no different with us, we use our brain but we don't understand how it works. >> I think the thing that separates humans from other animals is that >> about 100,000 years ago we developed a system that can encode even very >> abstract ideas into a few simple sounds; this not only enabled collective >> learning but also enormously magnified the power of individual thought. >> > > > So do you agree that having an inner narrative is the definition of > consciousness, > I said nothing about consciousness in the above, I was talking about intelligence > something much more restrictive than Bruno's "awareness"? > I am aware of X if I am conscious of it, and I am conscious of it if I am aware of it. And round and round we go. Philosophy and finding synonyms is not the same thing, or at least it shouldn't be. 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. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
