From: Randall Randall (randall@randallsquared.com)
Date: Fri Mar 06 2009 - 13:59:34 MST
On Fri, Mar 06, 2009 at 07:20:24AM -0800, John K Clark wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Mar 2009 "Randall Randall"
> <randall@randallsquared.com> said:
>
> > it could be that consciousness requires
> > intelligence but isn't actually intelligence.
>
> Well of course consciousness isn?t the same as intelligence! You can
> have consciousness without intelligence but not intelligence without
> consciousness.
I would reverse that. Being intelligent enough to know you're conscious
is a prerequisite for consciousness itself.
> > A human-equivalent intelligence with no goals
> > wouldn't reproduce very effectively in the
> > ancestral environment
>
> What?s that got to do with the price of eggs? A Do Loop in a computer
> program has a goal. If you want to get to the heart of the matter the
> question you have to ask is ?Can Evolution see consciousness or can it
> not??. If it can then the Turing Test works for consciousness and not
> just intelligence and we can know for certain if a computer is
> conscious.
If by "see" you mean "develop", I'd say that we're obvious example
proofs. I would guess that conscioussness has an adaptive advantage
over entities which are equivalently intelligent but not conscious,
inasmuch as consciousness is bound up with planning and simulating
actions. But it's all a guess, and I'll have to wait until it's all
better understood.
The argument that something can't exist because evolution didn't
produce it falls flat, though, when you consider wheels, aircraft
bodies, and calculators. Evolution works with what exists already,
rather than with what could exist.
> 1) Consciousness is an inevitable byproduct of intelligence, that is to
> say consciousness is just the way information feels like when it is
> being processed.
It's almost as if you *want* it to be all mysterious and spiritual. :)
-- Randall
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