RE: The dangers of genuine ignorance (was: Volitional Morality and Action Judgement)

From: fudley (fuddley@fastmail.fm)
Date: Sun May 30 2004 - 08:26:09 MDT


On Sun, 30 May 2004 "Pedro Machin" <breedingnitch@hotmail.com> said:

>Natural selection ´bothered´ to create a concious being,

Yes, natural selection created me, the only being known with certainty to
be conscious.

>but it also bothered to create many other non-concious intelligent beings.

Like what? And how did you figure out they were non conscious
 
>If we define intelligence simply as "the ability to solve
>complex problems" then there is no need for conciousness
>or sentience.

We are interested in many problems but the only problem, complex or
otherwise, natural selection is interested in is “figure out a way to get
as many of your genes into the next generation as possible”. So if you
can do that without consciousness why am I (and perhaps you too)
conscious?

>We have Automated Theorem provers right now that can tackle
>fairly sophisticated theorems […] In short, symbol manipulation,
>no matter at what level implies intelligence. 'Intuition', or
>'creativity' can effectively be emulated by such methods
>without the need of conciousness;

You claim to have detected intelligence in these programs, I can’t say I
agree but rather than argue the point I’ll ask another question: What
method did you use to detect non consciousness in these programs?

>conciousness is emergent of intelligence

Yes, exactly! So what are we arguing about?

 John K Clark

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