[extropy-chat] Qualia Bet

[Dirk Bruere]

On 11/27/05, gts <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 27 Nov 2005 13:43:48 -0500, John K Clark <jonkc at att.net> wrote:
>
> >> I would say that a bacterium acts intelligently or rationally
> >
> > Contrast is needed to see things, if EVERYTHING has a property then it's
> > invisible and there is no point in wasting perfectly good ASCII strings
> > like"intelligence" and "rationality" on it.
>
> I'm not suggesting everything is intelligent.
>
> I am suggesting that the most basic level of awareness is a simple
> physical change in response to the environment; that evolution produced
> organisms with evolved nervous systems not to *create* awareness, but
> rather to *exploit* it.
>
> And yes I agree that in some sense the word "awareness" becomes
> meaningless if everything is aware. But we need to use words to
> communicate our meanings. When you see that awareness is a meaningless
> word then you will have understood my argument.
>
> Intelligence, awareness, consciousness and qualia *may* be connected via
information processing but there are significant differences between the
meanings of each word.

Dirk
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