On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 6:06 PM 'Brent Meeker' < everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 5/17/2019 4:56 AM, John Clark wrote: > >> >> If you somehow knew for a fact a brilliant being was a zombie then >> you could immediately make one conclusion about it, the being could NOT be >> the product of Darwinian Evolution because Natural Selection can see >> intelligence but it can't see consciousness in others any better than we >> can, and it can't select for something it can't see. > > > * > I don't see how that follows. If zombies are possible then evolution > could have produced brilliant zombies. It might just be an accident that > evolution took the "consciousness" path at some point. * > Even if we got super mega ultra lucky and Evolution just happened to produce a mutated gene that gave a being consciousness it would be lost in just a few generations due to genetic drift because however much we may value consciousness natural selection can't see it or hear it or touch it or detect it or be effected by it in any way. Genetic Drift is the reason cave animals have no eyes, their ancestors had eyes but once they got trapped in pitch dark caves the gene that produced eyes no longer had any survival value. Outside the cave a mutation that stopped the eye producing gene from working would be fatal to an animal, but inside the cave it would be an advantage, expensive resources used to make that eye could be used for other more productive things, like having more offspring. But unlike consciousness natural selection can see and detect and be effected by behavior, and animals with intelligent behavior get more of their genes into the next generation than animals with less intelligent behavior. And it is beyond dispute that random mutation and natural selection managed to produce a conscious being at least once, and although unproven it may have done it more than once, perhaps many billions of times; therefore it is logical for me to conclude that consciousness and intelligence are linked and consciousness is a unavoidable byproduct of intelligence, it is just the way data feels like when it is being processed. John K Clark -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv2wY6uFYAOMTVBAorj3xLFqEZYK1qZP8Fr3EfS%2B9w6MmQ%40mail.gmail.com.
