[ExI] Mental Phenomena

[Brent Allsop]

Hi Dylan,
All of that may be true, but you are still focusing only on what doesn't
matter, and ignoring what does matter, as if you are completely afraid of
accepting the truth or something.
What you say doesn't change the fact that substrate independence takes a
lot more dictionaries, otherwise, you cant get the word red from all the
different substrates.  Where just always using redness only requires one
dictionary.
And if all you need to know is that your knowledge of yourself needs to get
away from your knowledge of the tiger chasing you.  You don't need any
dictionaries at all.  In fact you don't even need knowledge that your
knowledge is different than reality.  But, if you want to understand and
hack consciousness, and know what it is going to be like to be uploaded,
you need a little more sophisticated model of reality.

On Thu, Feb 13, 2020 at 4:26 PM Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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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