[ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life?

[Stefano Vaj]

On 31 December 2011 09:29, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't find it so striking. Even with all our modern science, we
> cannot really explain consciousness very well at all... just some kind
> of emergent behavior of neurons... so making something up that
> separates consciousness (which is admittedly mysterious) from the body
> (which isn't quite so mysterious) seems like a natural thing for our
> pattern recognition engines to do.
>

Personally, I think that lest we risk to fall again in metaphysical traps
and in the related paradoxes (philosophical zombies, etc.) it is best to
consider consciouness and identity in strictly phenomenical, ethological
and sociological terms, more or less as we do for "collective identities" -
something which, btw, goes hand in hand with Minsky's intuitions about
the Society
of the Mind<http://www.amazon.com/Society-Mind-Marvin-Minsky/dp/0671657135/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325338063&sr=1-1>
.

Accordingly, I never found persuasive the black-and-white views of
consciousness, with the related narratives of computers suddenly
"awakening", as in The Difference
Engine<http://www.amazon.it/Difference-Engine-William-Gibson/dp/0440423627/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325338258&sr=8-1>or
The
Escapist<http://www.amazon.com/The-Escapist-ebook/dp/B004S7AHC2/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325338405&sr=1-8>.


Not only is consciousness basically an evolutionary artifact (a "spandrel"
in the Gould's sense), unrelated to plausible definitions of the
"intelligence" of a given system in more general terms, but its emergence
is gradual: from an asleep or drugged status to an alert one, from infancy
to childhood, and of course from simpler ethologies to "higher" organisms.

-- 
Stefano Vaj
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20111231/15f3ad0f/attachment.html>