On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 9:29 PM, Lawrence Crowell <[email protected]> wrote: > 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]> wrote: >> > On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 11:16 AM, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> >> > 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 am on the Platonist camp, but fully realize that this is a personal bet / intuition. I agree with Bruno that if computationalism is true, then consciousness cannot be an epiphenomenon. But we don't know if computationalism is true. Dennett I just find just silly. I think he plays with words, and accepting his arguments would force me to deny something (the only thing) that I absolutely know to be true. > 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. Agreed. I'm not sure we will ever be able to understand consciousness -- there is really no reason to assume that this is possible. If it is, I bet that it will require a quantitative jump in our understanding of reality. I most definitely do not believe that it can be solved by incrementalist research in neuroscience. Telmo. > 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. -- 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.
