On Sun, Nov 01, 2015 at 11:23:47PM -0800, Pierz wrote: > > > On Sunday, November 1, 2015 at 8:39:12 PM UTC+11, Russell Standish wrote: > > > > On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 08:55:09PM -0700, Pierz wrote: > > > > > > 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. > > > > I don't think we know enough about consciousness to really say one way > > or the other, so no the onus is not on anyone. > > > > "Onus" or not, computationalists should at least attempt to be consistent. > If genetic algorithms are considered potentially conscious, then it is > legitimate to ask why evolution itself would not be. One should examine all > the ramifications of a theory and not simply wave the uncomfortable ones > away by saying "we can't know." It's often in the pursuit of the
To be fair, I never said "we can't know". What I said is "we don't know". I think it premature to speculate whether biological evolution implements a conscious program, in other words, maybe fun for pub talk, but generally speaking a waste of time. > implications of a theory to the last possible limit that things get > interesting - think Einstein pursuing the constancy of the speed of light Sure - but there are plenty of ways of doing this without falling over into idle speculation. The notion that consciousness is an evolutionary process does have some testable claims, for example. > to its logical conclusion. It's also where the theory's flaws are likely to > be exposed. It seems to me though that computationalists are generally > mainly interested in explaining away the apparent mystery of the Hard > Problem of consciousness in the brain, rather than overturning the > conception of nature as an unconscious machine. But that *is* what it leads > to ISTM - at least the Putnamesque, functional type version of CTM. > How so? It's not at all clear it has anything to say on these matters. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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.
