On 10/31/2015 8:55 PM, Pierz wrote:
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?
I take it you mean life is doing a computation which consists of finding
ways to live and reproduce. Life on Earth is executing THE
paradigmatic genetic algorithm.
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".
Yes, I think that's right in a sense. Life in a sense forms a
representation of the world. If a alien scientist were told just about
the living organisms on Earth he could infer a great deal about the
inorganic aspects of the planet. I don't know if you could say it's
self-aware, except by inclusion of ourselves. The problem is that it
may be conscious in such a different way from humans or animals that it
doesn't really add anything to our understanding of it to say it is
conscious. I've sometimes had a similar idea about the atmosphere and
weather. Isn't weather a kind of computation performed by the
atmosphere and isn't it aware of things in its environment like solar
heating, ocean currents and temperatures, human activities like jet
liners and burning fossil fuel,...
Brent
Thoughts?
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