On Sunday, March 18, 2018 at 10:34:17 AM UTC-6, telmo_menezes wrote: > > On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 5:18 PM, John Clark <[email protected] > <javascript:>> wrote: > > On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 11:16 AM, Telmo Menezes <[email protected] > <javascript:>> > > wrote: > >>> > >>> >> Evolution produced me. I know with 100% certainty that I am > >>> >> conscious. I very strongly suspect billions of other things are > conscious > >>> >> too. I know for a fact Evolution can detect intelligent behavior > but it > >>> >> can’t detect consciousness and yet I am consciousness. Therefor > >>> >> consciousness MUST be a byproduct intelligence. Evolution says as > much about > >>> >> consciousness as there is to say, it is the best purely logical > argument > >>> >> against solipsism, in fact it is the only one, all the others are > just > >>> >> variations of “my initiation says its untrue” or “solipsism is too > strange > >>> >> to be true”. > >> > >> > >> > >> > This assumes that if evolution produced X, then any property of X is > >> > also a product of evolution. > > > > > > Not any property > > of > > X, just any property the parts of X didn't have before Evolution > started > > its work. You walk into a bakery and see a cake and you assume the baker > > made the cake. Do you also assume the baker made the flower in the cake, > and > > the carbon in the flower, and the protons in the carbon, and the quarks > in > > the protons? > > No, because the cake is an improbable thing, while protons are > probable things. I don't know how probable consciousness is. As you > said, I cannot detect it. > > >> > >> > It is trivially not the case. For example, you have mass and an > >> > electromagnetic field and a temperature, and yet neither mass nor > >> > electromagnetism nor temperature are products > >> of evolution. > > > > I know Evolution produced my physical brain and I know with 100% > certainty > > my brain is conscious, > > But you don't know what else is conscious. > > > however I do not know with 100% certainty that mass > > or electromagnetism or temperature are conscious, in fact I rather > suspect > > they are not and there is only one reason I have that suspicion, they do > not > > behave intelligently. > > Intelligent behavior is relative to humans. It just means that you are > good at the things that are necessary to succeed in a specific > evolutionary niche that the Lovecraftian-horror a.k.a. nature > produced. It also produced myriad other things. > > Humans are terribly complex, and it might be that consciousness arises > from terribly complex things, or from certain types of terribly > complex things. But I don't really know and neither do you. > > Telmo. >
In a part what you say is spot on. The problem with consciousness is there is a lot more ignorance about it than much in the way of certain knowledge. It may be a sort of epiphenomenon that emerges from some class of complex systems, which at this time we do know understand. Roger Penrose thinks it is something is a triality of physics, mathematics and mind, which is a sort of Platonic look. Dennett on the other hand thinks consciousness is a sort of illusion, which is a sort of epiphenomenon. Dennett calls it a hetererophenomenon as it involves a sort of game of multiple drafts. We really do not know for sure what consciousness is. I can think of things that strike me as obstructions to the idea of uploading brain states to a computer. The issue of NP-completeness seems plausible, and classic NP-complete problems are combinatorial systems which the brain is an example of. Other questions seem to make this problematic. It does seem to me the barrier of ignorance is far higher than our ability to vault over it. LC -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
