Re: [sl4] Re: Uploads coming first would be good, right?

From: John K Clark (johnkclark@fastmail.fm)
Date: Fri Mar 06 2009 - 08:20:24 MST


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.

> 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 it can’t then there are only two possibilities to explain
the observation that at least one conscious being exists in the
universe:

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.

2) Darwin was wrong and the Bible thumpers were right after all.

 John K Clark

-- 
  John K Clark
  johnkclark@fastmail.fm
-- 
http://www.fastmail.fm - Accessible with your email software
                          or over the web


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:01:04 MDT