[extropy-chat] Qualia Bet.

[John K Clark]

"Damien Broderick" <thespike at satx.rr.com>

> Everything built from them is thus riddled with acausality, so natural
> selection has no option but to include this feature of the world. If
> somehow acausality then re-emerges at the macro level, and is useful for
> survival, as I think Penrose would assert, then evolution will conserve
> the genomes that happen to concentrate and utilize this trick.

It's not just Penrose that asserts that, every biologist does, they assert
that the two things that make Evolution work are:

1) Random (effects without a cause) mutation
2) Natural selection.

If the Turing Test can detect intelligence but not consciousness then we
must have a gene that manufactures qualia but doesn't do anything else, it
can't effect behavior or the test would work. We might value such a gene a
great deal but to Natural Selection it's useless, in fact to Natural
Selection it's invisible. Even if the gene came about by a lucky chance like
a tornado in a junkyard assembling a 747 it would soon atrophy away after a
few generations as the eyes of cave fish do.

In short if Turing doesn't work then we have a gene that only makes qualia
but Evolution could never provide such a gene therefore I conclude Turing
does work for consciousness. Good think too because every single person on
this list uses it every single day of their lives.

    John K Clark