On 2/3/2015 6:43 PM, John Clark wrote:
On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 2:07 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>> Mutations happen all the time and nearly all of them are harmful. In
most animals If a mutation happens that
renders it blind that will be a severe handicap and the animal will not
live
long enough to pass that mutated gene onto the next generation; but if
it
happens in a cave creature it's no handicap at all and so it will get
into the
next generation, the end result is that cave creatures are not only
blind they
don't even have eyes, and yet they survive just fine.
> But it is biologically costly to make and maintain eyes.
Even if the cost was zero they would not keep those eyes for long because there would no
evolutionary pressure to do so. So random mutation would ensure that they didn't..
Biologists even use something like this to estimate how long ago 2 species had a common
ancestor. Mutations happen at a known statistical rate and some of the DNA in the gnome
doesn't code for genes or regulate genes or do anything except duplicate itself, so they
look at this non-coding DNA in the 2 species and see how different it is, the bigger the
difference the older the common ancestor must have been. This won't work for the parts
of DNA that code for genes because it changes much more slowly than the non-coding DNA
does and the changes that do happen don't occur at a constant rate, lots of other thing
besides the mutation rate come into play.
But according to your theory all that junk DNA should be eliminated. It has no behavioral
effect and so "evolution can't see it" as someone is fond of writing.
And are you suggesting that this consciousness mechanism at work in biological brains
operates on zero energy and no tissue needs to be made for it and thus
the consciousness mechanism has zero biological cost?
No, not in biological brains on this planet. I'm suggesting that brains which developed
differently, such as being designed by AI engineers, might not need the same mechanism to
be intelligent.
What I think most likely is that /*our*/ consciousness is implemented by some mechanism
that is creating a summary narrative of what is experienced and this provides an advantage
because it can be reviewed (remembered) to provide experiential learning. Creation of the
narrative both compresses the data and tags it for recall. And it does incur some
biological cost.
> But maybe it [consciousness] was "tacked" on to integrate information
processing
from different independent modules, e.g. vision, language, touch,... which
in
different developmental path, say AI, might have been organized in a
hierarchy or
unified from the start. The latter might even be more efficient, but
evolution
can't go back and start over, it can only take small steps of improvement.
Maybe I'm wrong but to me that all seems pretty contrived and intended to show that
humans are superior, but it doesn't work because if true humans are doomed to be
intellectually inferior to computers because their brain is organized in a fundamentally
inferior way. And it gives credence to what I said before, it's not important if humans
believe computers are conscious, the important thing is if computers think humans are
conscious.
Yes, I agree with that. I never intended to show humans are superior. They are already
inferior by many measures.
Brent
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