[ExI] Mental Phenomena

[Dylan Distasio]

I'm not going to touch on the other things I snipped yet because I do need
to give it more thought, but I would question that evolution ends up with
the simplest possible machinery.  Evolution is a chain of events dependent
on a limited tree of possibilities (driven by the limitations of biophysics
and potentially how far down a branch of evolutionary possibilities it has
moved).  It frequently does not end up with the most elegant solution or
the simplest possible machinery.

I think you're making a big presumption to assume that implementing
substrate specific consciousness is efficiently survivable compared to
other possibilities on an evolutionary decision tree.  There may have been
trade offs in the genes used or physical implementation in the brain that
end up in a different implementation thriving.

 As I mentioned, it seems just as arguable at this point that consciousness
came about as a second order effect that turned into a huge advantage for
human beings.   Evolution arguably only cares about what spreads the most
genes, and for most of the biosphere, human level consciousness doesn't
seem to be an advantage or is an extremely rare evolutionary trait, or I
would imagine we would have seen it evolve in other species that have
highly complex nervous systems.

On Thu, Feb 13, 2020 at 6:13 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
> And of course, evolution doesn't need a simple way to design things, it
> just needs the simplest possible machinery, so it implements consciousness
> directly on physical qualities, because that is more efficiently survivable.
>
>
>
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