On 5/16/2015 4:44 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 2:48 PM, Bruce Kellett
So you think that Darwinian evolution produced intelligent zombies,
and then computationalism infused consciousness?
No. What I am saying is that consciousness is not a plausible target for gradual
evolution for the following reasons:
1) There is no evolutionary advantage to it, intelligent zombies could do equally well.
Every single behaviour that each one of us has, as seen for the outside, could be
performed by intelligent zombies;
Do you find it an advantage to be conscious in your everyday life? Do you really think
that your partner and/or children are zombies?
I think the obvious inference is that one way to gain intelligence is to become
conscious. But being conscious isn't just one all-or-nothing ability. There's being
aware of the environment...being aware of oneself...being able to model oneself in an
environment, including a social environment in which you model other beings as aware and
similar to yourself. I think there can be different kinds of awareness just as there are
different modes of perception. Whether intelligence at the human level could be realized
without the kind of self-modeling implicit in consciousness seems doubtful, but it might
be possible in some radically different kind of AI. That wouldn't necessarily mean it
wasn't conscious, but only that it might be conscious=self-aware in such a different way
we'd have a hard time recognizing it. For example, most of our memories are
reconstructions as opposed to faithful recordings. If there were an AI that had
enormously greater memory capacity, it might make a lot more intelligent decisions just by
repeating some remembered action (Big Blue played chess sort of like this as compared to a
human player).
2) There is no known mechanism of conscious generation that can be climbed.
If consciousness is just a matter of self-modeling, then it is an advantage that would
show up in intelligence of decisions and natural selection could act on it.
For example, we understand how neurons are computational units, how connecting neurons
creates a computer, how more neurons and more connections create a more powerful
computer and so on. Evolution can climb this stuff. There is no equivalent known
mechanism for consciousness.
This is the tired old creationist crap saying that the eye is too complicated to be
explained by evolution; the bacterium's flagellum is too complicated...; the ...... is
too complicated .....
At bottom, it is just an argument from ignorance. You do not happen to know a mechanism
whereby consciousness could develop from simpler forms. But that does not in any way
mean that such is not possible. Creationist anti-intellectualism yet again....
I don't know if intelligent zombies are possible. Maybe consciousness necessarily
supervenes on the stuff necessary for that level of intelligence. But who knows where
consciousness stops supervening? Maybe stuff that is not biologically evolved is
already conscious. Maybe stars are conscious. Who knows? How could we know?
I see it as an engineering question. When we can reliably create AIs that act
intelligently and appear as conscious as other human beings and we can create AIs that
have more or less humor, guilt, ego,... Then we will have understood it.
Brent
What we can know, by scientific investigation, is that all known life forms evolved from
simpler forms by processes generally described under the heading of Darwinian evolution.
Consciousness is a feature of many living creatures. If you want to argue that
consciousness is something outside the normal evolutionary process, then you have
embraced an irreducibly dualist position.
I can see that computationalism might well have difficulties accommodating a gradual
evolutionary understanding of almost anything -- after all, the dovetailer is there in
Platonia before anything physical ever appears. So how can consciousness evolve gradually?
This, it seems to me, is just another strike against comp -- it does not fit with the
scientific data.
Bruce
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