OK, a subject title designed to provoke, but here's a thought that has intrigued me. Computationalism (and let's not worry for the time being about whether one buys Bruno's UDA) states that consciousness supervenes on computation. This necesssarily implies (by Church thesis) that the hardware doesn't matter. This commits us to some unintuitive scenarios in which thought is instantiated by means of carrier pigeons delivering letters with symbols written on them, or dominoes falling or whatever. It's assumed that such a computation must reach a certain level of complexity in order to become conscious, though what level of complexity is not specified. According to some views (Brent has expressed this position), it is necessary that the computations reference a "world", though I'll admit I don"t understand the rationale for that exactly. Important though is that it is neither necessary that the computations are carried out in some localised "device"/brain nor that they are carried out by "wetware".
So my thinking is this: isn't *evolution* precisely such a computation? It is undoubtedly an extremely complex calculation (more so than any human thought has ever been), and it undoubtedly "references a world". Bruno mentions "Loebianity" in this context as well, or the capacity for self-reference. I'm not so sure about this in relation to an evolutionary computation. Certainly it is a highly recursive procedure with a continual self-environment feedback loop. I don't understand Loebianity sufficiently to say whether genes , or the gene-environment system, might possess it. However I'm also not sure if it's required for consciousness, or merely *self*- consciousness. I don't see that the possession of qualia demands the possession of self-awareness, though I can also see that it is at least conceivable that an evolutionary feedback system might possess a kind of self-reference. Anyway it seems that if we're committed to computationalism plus Church thesis, then we have to consider the possibility that evolution may be a conscious process - indeed the onus should be on us to say why it *wouldn't* be conscious. Which does not mean I am suggesting some mystical additional ingredient. Evolution would still be described objectively in terms of random mutation plus environmental selection, but this process may have an interior component, its own "1P". Thoughts? -- 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.
