On 5/18/2019 5:28 PM, John Clark wrote:
On Sat, May 18, 2019 at 7:54 PM 'Brent
Meeker<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>Evolution is unlikely to have stumbled upon a complex method
of achieving intelligence if there was a much simpler basic
procedure to do the same thing
/> You must not have looked at how DNA is use to code for
proteins. There are huge strecthes DNA that are just unused
copies of other segments./
I am well aware that there are huge sections of DNA that just repeat
the same thing for hundreds or even thousands of times, but I don't
see the relevance because if they just repeat the same short phrase
over and over then they contain no information. And there are other
DNA sections that once were genes but over the eons have been turned
off (such as genes in birds that once produced teeth in
their ancestors). These sections don't do anything anymore and the
way we know they no longer do anything is that the variation from
individual to individual in those sections is much much greater than
the variation in the parts that still have a purpose. Because they do
nothing Natural Selection can't edit out errors in DNA duplication so
they accumulate from generation to generation.
Right. So if consciousness just supervenes on intelligent computation,
natural selection couldn't act on it and it could persist. I don't
think this is particularly likely. But I do think there may be
different kinds of intelligent computation and correspondingly different
kinds of consciousness. The octopus may be a natural example. Their
behavior is quite intelligent, but 2/3 of their neurons are in their
tentacles and the tentacles appear to be able to act independently.
Brent
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