The Evolutionary Hotseat

[Borodog]

If you don't think that the electromagnetic field can affect behavior, go stick you tongue in a light socket.

I just meant that electricity and magnetism are real things that affect material things in physical ways. You can store up and release energy from the electromagnetic field and affect physical changes with it. Which would simply mean that the physical construct we're talking about is more than just a network of firing neurons and synapses; it involves the actual fields themselves. Upon reflection, this doesn't do extro or myself any good in the context of the current discussion, because it gets you not one iota closer to explaining why there is an experience at all. It just postulates that perhaps the physical information processing system is a little more complicated. It's a Dell instead of an abacus. That still doesn't explain why it feels.

I think that Chalmers' resorting to some new unobservable fundamental is warranted. He compares it to Maxwell, but Maxwell needed his new fundamentals to explain things physically observable effects. And while I think extro and I would agree that consciousness is internally observable, and therefore is a candidate for explanation, it is not at all clear that it has any effect. From what I've read, all of the little bits and pieces that make up consciousness corespond exactly with structures in the brain doing the equivalent piece of functional information processing. When you damage that piece of hardware, boom, that structure or capability is gone from the consciousness.

Will think more.

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[This message has been edited by Borodog (edited 07-18-2002 03:25 PM).]

[extropalopakettle]

OK, so again, I reiterate (and I really think we're getting somewhere with this):

[Borodog]

Ok, I think we're back at a point we can disagree on. ;-)

[Lucky Wizard]

Bump. I posted a question a good two weeks ago.

[Borodog]

Woops! Completely missed it in the discussions with extro.

Lucky Wizard: How do you feel about Alan Thorne's "Regional continuity" theory?

It's too soon to tell.

Personally I think a combination of the replacement and regional continuity theories is not absurd. It is concievably that the suite of traits the we would associate with "modern" humans evolved in Africa some 100-300 thousand years ago. These traits included characteristics that allowed them to spread rapidly (geologically and evolutionarily speaking) out across the world. But if this process where ongoing, i.e. there was always a constant genetic flux from population to population, then superior genes would have flowed in waves across the peoples of the world, while local genetic inertia would allow for some regional continuity of phenotype.

It looks like the Mungo Man dating may be seriously flawed; rather than 60,000 years old, he's probably only 45,000, placing him at the forefront of the invasion of modern humans into Australia to be sure, but definitely modern.

Time, the fossils, mitochondrial DNA, and the weight of the evidence will tell. I do find it odd that one of their claims seems to be that regional continuity should account for the rise of Australian aboriginals, when the mitochondrial DNA from Mungo Man does not match them (Australian aboriginals in fact share the same mitochondrial DNA common ancestor as the rest of us).


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[Amb]

In case any one cares I believe in creationism, but I do see that a certain amount of natural selection does occur. What I find befuddling is the number of polarised people on either side of this debate that each seem to take the facts that suit their point of view and ignore or refute (inadequately) those that dont. Creation scientists often point at "facts" that help prove a young earth but seemingly refuse to acknowledge incidences that say otherwise. Evolutionary scientists tend to the same extreme with regards to the vice versa.

I personally wonder if there is a middle road in the debate where all concerned can put aside their intuition and respective histories and experiences and look objectively at all the facts. My opinion of creationism has come from my own reading on the topic and I try to be categorically objective when I read facts. If a question or fact comes up that makes my point of view look invalid I accept it and am happy to announce that I do not have the answer.

My Question is if not already asked is ... How does evolution account for the in built human reaction to spiritualisation. Nearly every human culture worships in some way, from the ancients of the Peruvian (and impossible) pyramids to the far middle east, to the obscureness of New Zealand, they all follow a spiritual song. But why? Either there is a spiritual side to the reality in which we live or evolution built it in for some purpose. Perhaps its both... Any opinions welcome. I may not agree, but that is the spice of life.

[Chuck]

Maybe spiritualism comes from survival instinct. People don't want to die and will cling to any belief that promises survival in some afterlife.

Or it could be a scam by primitive tribal leaders to keep their people in line. Promise them eternal life in paradise if they behave themselves now. Since the reward comes after death and can't be detected by the living, the leaders never have to deliver on their promise.

[Borodog]

amb: My Question is if not already asked is ... How does evolution account for the in built human reaction to spiritualisation. Nearly every human culture worships in some way, from the ancients of the Peruvian (and impossible) pyramids to the far middle east, to the obscureness of New Zealand, they all follow a spiritual song. But why? Either there is a spiritual side to the reality in which we live or evolution built it in for some purpose. Perhaps its both... Any opinions welcome. I may not agree, but that is the spice of life.

First, good to hear from you, amb. Long time no see.

Second, that's a whole lot of question. Right off the bat we should define "spiritualisation" which is an intesting term. I take it that you meant "spirituality", but I like the term "spiritualization" because it carries the connotation of we (the observers) "spiritualizing" the world around us. Also, I must say that I tend to use "spiritual" in a different way; I consider myself "spiritual" in the sense that I try to understand myself, those around me, and the amazing physical world we're surrounded by, not in the trees-and-rocks-have-spirits kind, or the God-is-everywhere flavor of "spirituality". But that's neither here nor there.

Anyway, here (IMHO) is why people "worship", which I will take to mean believe in the supernatural (be it ghosts, demons, spirits, God, prayer, divine providence, whatever). Human beings' specialty is generality. We're good at everything. One of the reasons we're good at everything is that evolution has gifted us with superb pattern recognition and reasoning abilities. We absolutely LOVE to find patterns. What patterns say you? Mostly cause and effect. This is highly selectively advantagous, as you might imagine. Understanding what causes different effects is critical to our survival strategy, it goes hand in hand with planning. How could you plan anything if you had no concept of the actions of your plan causing the desired effect?

Now, we are SO damn good at finding patterns of cause and effect that we often find them where they don't exist. It's a classic logical fallacy, but people do it all the time, post hoc, ergo propter hoc. After, therefore because of. It doesn't work that way in the real world, but we are hard wired to believe that it does, because often enough to make a difference in survival, what happened after reallly WAS caused by what happened before. Animals that eat something that makes them ill, but have no mechanism for associating eat this and get sick will not learn and will keep eating what makes them sick, obviously a darwinian handicap. Animals that associate eat this and get sick will avoid eating that again. And here's the kicker: they will avoid eating that food again even if it wasn't what actually made them ill. They can't know what made them sick, but it's better safe than sorry.

So we've established that human beings (as well as many other animals) use causal relationships to survive, and can sometimes be fooled when there really is no relationship there at all. But what do you suppose happens when the human being applies his absolutely superb reasoning, pattern recognizing, cause-effect hungry brain on effects that have no cause? Or at least no cause that it can understand? Like the wind? Or the rain? Or lightning and thunder? Or where the world came from? Or the plants and animals? Or what the stars are? Without a few thousand years worth of the shoulders of giants to stand on, early mankind had no hope of understanding the REAL causes of these effects. So he invented causes.

This is not unprecedented, either. We do this all the time. We are constantly hypothesizing, although we do the greatest amount when we are young and learning about the world. Put a seven year old in any bathroom in the world, and in under a minute he will have figured out how the fixtures work, regardless of how bizarre they may be. Some hypotheses are borne out (I have fleas in the house; I wonder if I have fleas on my dog, and I wonder if he got them beacuse I have flease in my yard?), some are not (I wonder if someone took my wallet? No, there it is). These petty hypotheses we make can easily be proven or disproven because we can check the evidence. But what happens when your hypothetical cause has no evidence? By definition? It becomes unfalsifiable. It can't be proved wrong, yet it fulfills the craving to have a cause for the lightning. There must be a lightning God, and boy howdy, he must be pissed. We'd better slaughter a goat or something.

Which brings me to my next point, superstitions. People, in general, are very superstitious. Don't step on cracks, don't walk under ladders (just recently I met a 45 year old man who in dead seriousness told me that if you look an owl in the eyes someone you love will die), pray for this, pray for that, play my lucky lotto numbers on my birthday, etc, etc, etc. The way that superstitions get started is our old friend pattern-recognition looking for cause and effect relationships, and finding them where they don't exist. We notice and remember the times when our superstition "hits" and happens to be correct because it fits the pattern we think we've identified. We ignore the times when it misses completely, because they don't fit the pattern. For instance, nearly everyone I know has a story of how they were thinking of someone in particular when the phone rang, and it was them. But do they tell the thousands of stories of how they were thinking of someone, and the phone rang, and it wasn't them? Or the tens of thousands of stories of how they were thinking of someone, and the phone didn't ring at all? Or how they weren't thinking at all about the person that called? No, of course not.

In fact, we're not the only animals that are superstitious. In his latest book, Unweaving The Rainbow Richard Dawkins tells the delightful story of some animal studies that show how they will exhibit superstitious behaviors, such as birds developing repetitive movements like jumping and bobbing to elicit food, when really the food is rewarded completely at random. Just like cancer. Or remission.

So it's pretty easy to see where the idea of an unseen cause for all of the effects beyond our comprehension (e.g. God or Gods) could have come from, and also pretty easy to see where ritual superstitious behaviors like praying, rain dances, sacrificing chickens and goats and oxen and virgins could have come from. And once a religion gets started, it's extremely difficult to get rid of it. The vast majority of people happen to be the same religion as their parents. Not coincidentally, children generally speak the same language as their parents. Children are built to soak up enormous amounts of information when they're young, how to talk, don't touch the hot stove, snakes are dangerous, Santa Claus comes down the chimney, the tooth fairy leaves quarters under your pillow in exchange for bloody teeth, Jesus loves me, this I know, 'cause the Bible tells me so, etc. Kids have no way of coroborating any of this information, and they shouldn't, they don't have the time at that age. They've got so much to learn. Besides why would mommy and daddy lie? Eventually mommy and daddy tell the child that the tooth fairy and Santa Claus aren't real. Or the kid figures it out himself, by determining there are more plausible causes for presents and quarters.

But most people haven't taken the time (and never will) to understand the more plausible causes for the universe, for life, for us. So it might as well still be the tooth fairy. Or whichever one it was.

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[This message has been edited by Borodog (edited 08-01-2002 05:38 AM).]

[Borodog]

By the way:

Originally posted by amb:

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Evolutionary scientists tend to the same extreme with regards to the vice versa.

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Such as . . . ?



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[Fried Egg]

Amb

[Annonymous Creationist]

"I have seen anti-creationists claim that all true scientists support Evolution, and that those who support Creation are not really scientists and that their credentials are less than legitimate. Is this true?"
-Frank

Is it true that during the 20th century, many scientists accepted Evolutionism, in part or in whole. As secular science writer Richard Milton recently observed:

"An important factor in bringing about the universal dominance and acceptance of Darwinian evolution has been that virtually every eminent professional scientist appointed to posts in the life sciences in the last 40 or 50 years, in the English-speaking world, has been a convinced Darwinist. ...These men, as well as occupying powerful and important academic teaching positions, were also prolific and important writers whose influence has been widespread in forming the consensus.1"

Richard Milton, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism (Rochester, Vermont: Park Street Press, 1992, 1997), p. 12.

These names include such men as Gavin de Beer, Julian Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, C.H. Waddington, Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky and George Simpson.

Despite strong pressure to accept evolutionism, many intelligent and experienced scientists either openly or secretly dismiss Evolution as highly unlikely or impossible. In the 1980s, researcher and lecturer David Watson noted an increasing trend that continues today, disturbing those who want evolutionism to be perceived as the accepted scientific consensus:


"...A tidal wave of new books... threaten to shatter that confidence -****les like Darwin Retried (1971), Macbeth; The Neck of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong (1982), Hitching; The Great Evolution Mystery (1983), Taylor; The Bone Peddlers: Selling Evolution (1984), Fix; Darwin Was Wrong - A Study in Probabilities (1984), Cohen; Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth (1987), Lovtrup; and Adam and Evolution (1984), Pitman. Not one of these books was written from a Christian-apologetic point of view: they are concerned only with scientific truth - as was Sir Ernst Chain when he called evolution 'a fairy tale'." 2

David C.C. Watson, "Book Reviews," Creation Research Society Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Terre Haute, Indiana: March 1989), p. 200 (emphasis added).]

As Science Digest reported:

"Scientists who utterly reject Evolution may be one of our fastest-growing controversial minorities... Many of the scientists supporting this position hold impressive credentials in science." 3

Larry Hatfield, "Educators Against Darwin," Science Digest Special (Winter 1979), pp. 94-96.

One example is the late Dr. Arthur E. Wilder-Smith, an honored scientist with an amazing three earned doctorates. He held many distinguished positions. 4. A former Evolutionist, Dr. Wilder-Smith debated various leading scientists on the subject throughout the world. In his opinion, the Evolution model did not fit as well with the established facts of science as did the Creation model of intelligent design.

Arthur Ernest Wilder-Smith: Chemist / Lecturer / Creationist / Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry at University of Reading, England (1941) / Dr.es.Sc. in pharmacological sciences from Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich / D.Sc. in pharmacological sciences from University of Geneva (1964) / F.R.I.C. (Fellow of the Royal Institute of Chemistry) / Professorships held at numerous institutions including: University of Illinois Medical School Center (Visiting Full Professor of Pharmacology, 1959-61, received 3 "Golden apple" awards for the best course of lectures), University of Geneva School of Medicine, University of Bergen (Norway) School of Medicine, Hacettepe University (Ankara, Turkey) Medical School, etc. / Former Director of Research for a Swiss pharmaceutical company / Presented the 1986 Huxley Memorial Lecture at the invitation of the University of Oxford / Author or co-author of over 70 scientific publications and more than 30 books published in 17 languages / Dr. Wilder-Smith was also a NATO three-star general.

"The Evolutionary model says that it is not necessary to assume the existence of anything, besides matter and energy, to produce life. That proposition is unscientific. We know perfectly well that if you leave matter to itself, it does not organize itself - in spite of all the efforts in recent years to prove that it does." 5

Arthur E. Wilder-Smith in Willem J.J. Glashouwer and Paul S. Taylor, The Origin of the Universe (PO Box 200, Gilbert AZ 85299 USA: Eden Communications and Standard Media, 1983).

Secular researcher Richard Milton summarized the current world situation: "Darwinism has never had much appeal for science outside of the English-speaking world, and has never appealed much to the American public (although popular with the U.S. scientific establishment in the past). However, its ascendancy in science, in both Britain and America, has been waning for several decades as its grip has weakened in successive areas: geology; paleontology; embryology; comparative anatomy. Now even geneticists are beginning to have doubts. It is only in mainstream molecular biology and zoology that Darwinism retains serious enthusiastic supporters. As growing numbers of scientists begin to drift away from neo-Darwinist ideas, the revision of Darwinism at the public level is long overdue, and is a process that I believe has already started." 6

Richard Milton, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism (Rochester, Vermont: Park Street Press, 1992, 1997), p. 277.

[extropalopakettle]

If I may, (though why bother answering someone who copies and pastes from creationist web sites, rather than risk offering his own thoughts) ...

quote:

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"I have seen anti-creationists claim that all true scientists support Evolution, and that those who support Creation are not really scientists and that their credentials are less than legitimate. Is this true?"
-Frank

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First, what do you mean by "Creation" here? The account in the Judae-Christian Bible?

Second, whether one is really a scientist and whether one has legitimate credentials are two completely different things. Being a scientist is, first and foremost, thinking like one.

I would contend that their are scientists who support Creationism, but that for the most part, it is a faith-based exception to their scientific way of thinking. This is always the case when the brand of Creationism they support is the one espoused by a particular widely held religion (generally their own religion).

When I hear a creationist who, while questioning the theory of evolution, makes it abundantly clear that it is certainly far more scientific and logical than the creation accounts of any existing religion, then I'll entertain the possibility that I'm listening to someone who is at least being honest.

[Coyote]

How does evolution work with colony-type insects like ants and termites? Is it possible for natural selection to cause changes in the structure of the entire colony without changing any of the individual insects comprising the colony?

[extropalopakettle]

I think the answer is no, unless (and I'm reasonably certain this is not the case with insects, though it is with people) the colony has a "culture" that is passed down from generation to generation through learning, and not through genetically determined instincts.

But this is Borodog's thread - I'm just butiing in.

[Aarondalf]

I really love this discussion: Which can be measured by the lack of work I have been getting done lately. I will post some of my thoughts after class.

[Aarondalf]

I know others have said this before, but to the anonymous creationalist:

Most of the people reading this thread are not "the general public" and will scrutinize any information they recieve. However, you are not even giving them that. You are only giving the names of people who believe what you believe, and saying that they are smart.

If you notice all the external references by others (extro, boro, etc..) you will see that not only do they say that others believe what they believe, but they also include the reasons why. This lets other intelligent (and even not so intelligent) people make up there minds based on the theories which are mostly comprised of facts.

While your tactics might work on people who are willing to just take others word for it, it wont work on people who have actually thought about it themselves.

In general, creationalists are these types of people. "The bible tells me so it must be true." or "My parents told me, it must be true." Hence you are, in effect, preaching to the choir... and in the end, is there really much point in that besides getting a select few to pat you on the back?

Now on to Consciousness:

I will propose another slightly different view to the norm. Perhaps consciousness is not a black and white area (to some extent).

In my opinion, consciousness is the picture inside the mind of one's surroundings. Not just the visual picture, but aural, olfactoral... etc...
Experience, is a completely different thing. Experience is the individual nerves firing, telling the brain, and hence one's consciousness more about the surroundings. However, consciousness does not need experience to exist. (This has more to do with quality of consciousness, which I will discuss in a bit).

Everyone has a consciousness, that is, a mental image of their surroundings. Now the question of whether our conscious affects the physical world is obviously no. (Our actions in retrieving information might alter the surroundings, but the underlying consciousness has no effect on anything but the way we act.) I guess there is a lot of semantics involved in that... but it is clear to me that in no direct way does our consciousness affect anything material. (Be it matter, or energy or waves... which in essence are all the same thing).

Now to quality of consciousness: This to me, is the accuracy between the real world and the picture of the world in your mind. I am assuming that there is an actual "real world" made of matter and such that interacts with itself in a number of ways... We have 5 senses, and these are fairly accurate in depicting the world. This is why we are able to reach logical conslusions about forces and relationships. We of course do not have a perfectly replicated conscious. That is, we dont have a sense that can locate and quantify magnetic fields, precise electric charges, etc... For this reason we were able to understand forces and momentum (things we can measure internally) much earlier than we could electricty and magnitsm. That doesnt mean we dont know about magnetism indirectly, it just means that we dont know about it as precisely as we know things like what objects reflect which light (visual). Its impossible to quantify our consciousness so I wont even try.

But to get to my point. Boro said that his dog has consciousness and I agree. Whether or not the dog has the same quality of consciousness is up to interpretation.

(On a side note, I believe quality of consciousness also relates to the "refresh rate" of ones mental picture. That is, how often does one take mental snapshots of the surroundings. It is also related to accuracy: Eg, to how precisely can you judge the size of this object, or what exact colour is it? These two facts may lead us to the conclusion that we have a better conscious than a dog, or maybe we are just better equiped at processing the information, but that is neither here nor there.)

What is important, is that the dog does have a conscious. (This goes against some of my friends views that we are gods chosen species, and only we have a consciousness.) You can extrapolate the "dogs have conscious" viewpoint back down the evolutionary ladder as far as you like, everything has a consious.

A trickier question, is whether or not the computer has a consious. There will probably be alot of people who disagree with me on this but I think consiousness is not defined by the ability to know that one's self exists... but that anything exists at all. In the latter case, all computers have some form of conscious, in the former no current computer is conscious but it is not beyond the realms of possibility to assume that at some point they will be. However, I dont think computers have anywhere near the quality of conscious that we, or any animals do.

Even so, the idea of an iterative processor as opposed to a parralel processor also becomes a simple one. Both are conscious... however one has a better quality of conscious. (Eg, the iterative processor has to compute one bit of data, then the next and at the same time it needs to feed back the result so that the next piece of data can access it (to process the ammount of information the brain encounters would take an enourmous ammount of time). The parallel processors can handle all the data at once, and only requires one pass to get the result. Even for trivial inputs, the processing speed in the parallel case only needs be a fraction of the speed in the iterative model.)

And Boro, in essence I guess that this is where I differ from you most noticably. I believe you said that you feel it is this ability to have access to all the information at once, and ability to process it at the same time that gives rise to consciousness. I disagree. The parallel model is the easiest way to achieve some form of quality in consious... whereas the other (while still being a means of achieving consicous) is not the optimum path.

Hence, even if our brains were the size of buildings, and had some brainspace associated with every bit of information we needed to process, we would still be conscious... although to what extent is the real debate, in my opinion.

To give an example:

Assume we can somehow genetically engineer an animal (because it most certainly wouldnt evolve through natural selection) that "sees" circles everytime you play a certain music. If this is its only internal sense, is it conscious? Sure, it doesnt know that it exists as a solid object, but it does "know" that circles appear every now and then. I believe that fact alone makes it conscious.

Here is the biggest puzzler of all though: The universe as a whole has a memory (All the matter in space). And it does have (although simple) algorithms for dealing with the interaction between any two given bits of matter. Even though it doesnt have any external stimuli (that we know of) it does have internal stimuli... does that make the universe a conscious entity itself? And because it knows the precise details of everything in it to an infinite degree (everything is where it is) does that make it a higher conscious? A god?

[Aarondalf]

It appears to me that I did not put enough thought into my post. There are a few things in it, which after some thinking lead me to believe that the opposite is true. However, I would still like to hear some form of response to my post from others because (while I do not even fully agree with my own statements) I think that it does make some rather though provoking points...

[extropalopakettle]

[Fried Egg]

Extro

[extropalopakettle]

[Fried Egg]

Extro

You seem to be claiming that consiousness cannot be observed experimentally and therefore it must have meta-physical causes. I am saying that it may be observable, we just don't know exacty what we're looking for...

Is consiousness merely an emergent phenomenon arising from the collective activity of our brain's neurons?

[extropalopakettle]

Going back to Aarondalf's suggestion that computers can be conscious, if so, could one possibly say their consciousness affects their behavior? As you step through the program the computer is running, each action at each step is fully determined, and can be explained completely without resorting to the notion of "consciousness". At what point could you say that some action was affected by the computer's or program's "consciousness"?

[Fried Egg]

Maybe the problem is that you're thinking about the consiousness and the behaviour as distinct entities. Isn't that a pluristic approach?

If the consiousness is mechanistic, I doubt that it is a seperate distinct entity from behaviour.

[extropalopakettle]

Consciousness and behavior are distinct entities. You might want to go back through this thread and read the back-and-forth between myself and Borodog to get a sense of what we're talking about when we say "consciousness". And the referred to papers (online) by David Chalmers are excellent reading on the topic.

Behavior can be observed. Consciousness absolutely can't be observed. There would be no evidence that it exists, except by being a conscious thing, unlike the evidence for the existence of everything else in the universe, which you can observe while being seperate from. Chalmer's talks about the many attempts to dismiss the problem by defineing away consciousness as something else, but that solves nothing - it's evasive.

Conceptuallly, there is something it is like to be me, or to be you. But does it make sense to ask what it is like to be a pebble? Is it different than not being anything at all? This is what "consciousness" is about.

I may be able to program a computer to look at it's surroundings and identify various colors, and, I believe, to respond to visual input as a human would. But if I understand it's program, I would not surmise that it can "see" the color green, in the way that I do. Do you understand the sense in which I mean "see" here? Because it is easy to define it away - to say that if the computer correctly identifies (behavior) the color green in it's surroundings, then by definition, it can "see" it. But there is a different sense of seeing - the one about which I can wonder whether you see the color green as I do. I would not posit that my "seeing" computer can see the color green in that sense of the word, and even if I did, I could not claim it mattered as far as determining the computer's behavior.

[Fried Egg]

Extro

[extropalopakettle]

[Fried Egg]

Extro

[extropalopakettle]

[Fried Egg]

Extro

[Aarondalf]

Extro... I really think you are trying hard to find something in nothing.

In my opinion, our brain is like an incredibly (but not infinitely) complex fractal. There are bound to be things that we cant understand about it, because of the sheer ammount of raw data it processes. (Yet)

Its like trying to work out the deepest layers of a fractal based purely on its implementation. No one person can. Just because things tend to "emerge" that werent predicted doesnt make them anything more than they are. (Divine, etc...)

Oh, and by your definition of "affecting the physical", I would say yes, our conscious does affect our actions and physical things, ect... The full mental picture can just be considered another internal input. (Although in this case, its not a single stream of "bits", its many streams of bits going to many diferent locations.) But, I believe consciousness is a direct result of inputs and the state of the brain and so maybe in the strictest of definitions only the inputs affect the output, even in humans. (If this makes you queasy about our specialness, then sorry... but I believe this is the way that it is.)

Another thought experiment:
We invent a machine to detect magnetic fields and input this information into the visual section of the brain. This helps (IMO) to improve our consciousness. But if you think computers are only just getting an input processing it and outputting something, and arent conscious... then one can only assume that you think that this new sense would not in any way add to our conscious as we are really only just getting an external input and processing it.

Consciousness in your sense of the word (IMO) does not, and will not, exist.

[extropalopakettle]

Fried Egg:

[extropalopakettle]

From earlier,

Originally posted by Aarondalf:

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There will probably be alot of people who disagree with me on this but I think consiousness is not defined by the ability to know that one's self exists... but that anything exists at all.

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I don't agree with either. The important thing is not to get into pointless discussions about what a word means when that is not your intention. The intention, earlier in this thread, was to talk about a particular thing we know. We use words like "consciousness" and "subjective experience", but we were careful to make sure it was clear that we're all talking about the same thing. When a rock hits you in the head, you don't quibble about the definition of a rock - you know the object you're talking about. Here we're talking about something we know even better.

[Aarondalf]

I am just saying that "self experience" is something that doesnt need any sort of higher power to exist. From what I have read in this topic you (whether or not you are directly saying it) are. Maybe I am spawning an argument on a tangent to what you were previously discussing with Borodog, that doesnt mean that I. And laughing has never really been a very strong argument.

And what I mean by "bits" is this. Bits stream into the brain, make a picture in the head that we KNOW must exist (even if the rocks, trees and sounds dont). Once we have this picture, that information (in the form of a stream of bits) is sent back to other parts of the brain. Its like a feeback loop, where the result returns to become an input. I think that the sum is NOT greater than the parts. Is a pretty factal greater than the sum of its initial conditions and algorithms?

And I wasnt trying to make semantic loopholes by defining consciousness in the other post. I understand what you are talking about when you say "consciousness" or self experience. What I mean is that, if we have it, so do they.

I am not sure of your thoughts on this but: If computers dont have a "self experience" then you would assume that microbes and such dont either. But we KNOW humans do. Do apes have it? Do fish have it? At what point on the evolutionary ladder did we suddenly "get" consciousness?

[Aarondalf]

About the whole "queasy" line. I meant, if you were to suddenly believe what I was saying is true. I know you DONT and probably wont so cmon, give me a little more credit.

[extropalopakettle]

[Aarondalf]

First off, hopefully you will see that age has nothing to do with whos debate is any better than anyone elses. What about a mentally handicapped person who is much older than me? Is their grasp of the idea any bette than mine? You may have a more thorough understanding of this than I do... but then again maybe since you have studied it longer, you are not as open to new arguments as me. The thing is, I choose to give you the benifit of the doubt on your openess, just as you should give me the benefit of the doubt about my knowledge.

[extropalopakettle]

[Aarondalf]

[BraveHat]

Wait a minute. Hitler only had one testicle?

[extropalopakettle]

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_128b.html