On 29 Nov 2014, at 00:08, Richard Ruquist wrote:
It may just be herding instinct or projection on my part,
but it seems that my chickens are more intelligent
as a group than individually.
I attribute that to a group mind due to entanglement
in a mind/matter duality.
I would be astonished that we need the quantum to explain Chicken
behavior, but then we can't be sure.
I remind having read some times ago a paper showing that pigeons
solved a problem more efficiently than humans, but I don't remember
the references. Not sure it is serious, but it is not impossible, and
of course this measure a competence, not intelligence.
Bruno
Richard
On Fri, Nov 28, 2014 at 4:56 PM, Kim Jones <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 29 Nov 2014, at 2:42 am, John Clark <[email protected]> wrote:
Kim Jones:
>> Yes but tell me of the examples you have found of Evolution
producing intelligence without consciousness.
> iPhones. Smart fridges. Self-driving cars. Computers. Space
probes etc. etc.
If you believe all these things are smart then fine,
"Smart" I take to mean "highly competent in a way that a human can
understand and benefit from". I don't think this exhausts the
possibilities of being smart. My iPad exists relative to me on the
level of a trusted slave-labourer. When Siri asks me to pay her for
the service of finding a great Vietnamese restaurant within walking
distance, I will attribute consciousness to her - given that Apple
isn't pulling my leg somehow.
but what makes you think they're not conscious?
They may well be. I can certainly hold that thought in my mind and
give it good consideration. To me this question exists on much the
same level as "have extraterrestrials visited the Earth?" Well it's
entirely possible, but highly improbable given the evidence
available. It's also possible that we haven't seen anything like all
of the evidence for or against that yet. I recently read somewhere
that Google engineers have admitted that Google now does things they
themselves have not directly authorised nor fully understand the
need for. That, if true, is super-smart. And just a little scary. If
something as autonomous as that is happening without an ego or an
experiencing self observing itself doing these things then we have
already eliminated the "need" for consciousness in the MV. In fact
there is precisely NO need for consciousness at all if intelligence
(IQ = horsepower; grunt of the engine) alone is enough to invent a
self-driving car or an orbital space station. Yet, we do have
consciousness - whether we "need" it or not. This, to my mind leads
straight to the mind-body problem that you seem eternally ready to
deny. Intelligence is like the colour of your eyes or your height or
the dimensions of your schwannstücker. It's fixed and immutable. You
have an engine upstairs of a certain horsepower, that's all. Can't
change that. Intelligence is more like low-level consciousness,
without Löbianity. Still, this is immensely effective and powerful.
Ant colonies. Forests. Bee hives. Corporations. Flying cars. All
hugely intelligent and adapted to the environment in which they
arose. Conscious? Could be, could be. Basically, I am undecided on
that. Anyone who is "decided on that" on the basis of available
evidence has fallen headlong into the Intelligence Trap.
When Evolution made information processing devices it found it was
much much easier to produce emotion than intelligence,
Not really. Emotion is a very central part of intelligence.
Evolution produced intelligence which is absolutely one hundred per
cent tethered to emotions.
It works like this: emotions are the qualia. Qualia are events. A
non-conscious subject cannot differentiate events happening "inside"
from events happening "outside". That somewhat unnecessary
distinction requires consciousness. An amoeba simply reacts to
events, and learns strategies for survival from them. That's
intelligence.
so why in the world would we find the exact opposite to be true
when we make the same sort of thing?
Because intelligence is easy to produce. Emotions are hard to
produce. It's exactly the opposite of what you are saying. Evolution
always produces intelligence, even when it delegates the
evolutionary process to the accelerated-intelligent entities (us)
and there appears to be no end to how far intelligence can evolve.
If Google becomes any more competent I think they should stick it in
the White House and let it run the planet for us while we all romp
naked through the heather and smell the wildflowers...and other
bizarre behaviour of conscious beings. You are definitely right when
you say that evolution cares not a fig about consciousness.
Evolution is not itself an experiential subject of any sort, so
that's hardly surprising. Evolution is the name given by conscious
beings to a rhythmic, harmonic process of adaptation observed
happening over time. "Evolution" means simply "things persist or
they don't, given their behaviour." Consciousness would then fit in
as a new kind of adaptive behaviour - from evolution's perspective.
> Evolution is supposed to be "the only game in town"
I don't know who you're quoting but it's not me, and it's not true,
at least not anymore.
PZ Meyers, Larry Krauss, Dicky Dawkins et al at their atheist/
physicalist talkfests
At one time Evolution was the only way complex objects could get
make, but that stopped being true 545 million years ago during the
Cambrian Explosion when, more than 3 billion years after life first
appeared, Evolution finely managed to make the first primitive brain.
Freudian slip. Here you smuggle your (as yet unacknowledged) version
of the "creator deity" into the equation. Evolution didn't finally
manage to make anything. Evolution is not a thing at all - it's a
process, which is a sequence of events which in this case
occasionally results in adaptive traits in organisms, including
their behaviour, most importantly of all. This is not a semantic
quibble. You appear to be assuming the need for consciousness right
at the outset. You are saying that evolution had a purpose right
from the start which was to introduce consciousness somehow. This
simply makes evolution into a deity. You cannot assume that the goal
of evolution was implicit at its very beginnings. You cannot even
assume that evolution has any goal or purpose at all - it simply
happens.
> Evolution has produced all of these things, John.
Evolution made us, but we made the iPhone; Evolution has severe
limitations and could never have made a iPhone, it never even
managed to make a macroscopic part that moved in 360 degrees.
It did it through us. We are the new agents working for evolution.
In so far as evolution produced an entity that was able to
accelerate and ramp-up its intelligence to the level of
consciousness, then I would say that evolution created the wheel.
Evolution is the Blind Watchmaker. Transhumanism etc - this is
"hyper-accelerated evolution". You write as though homo sapiens are
sitting somewhere on the sidelines observing evolution going on but
not taking part in it.
Kim
John K Clark
so where else could they have come from?
Kim
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