[ExI] Possible seat of consciousness found

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Sun Feb 16 15:10:25 UTC 2020


On Sun, Feb 16, 2020 at 9:33 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> You are talking about computers, boxes, simulations, and evolution.
> Let's talk about people.
>

OK let's talk about people. People were produced by Evolution. I am a
person and I am conscious. If intelligent behavior and consciousness we're
not inextricably linked then Evolution could not have done that.

> I don't know much about biochemistry, but I know how complex it can be
> and you seem to be denying that.
>

Biochemistry and biology in general is indeed fantastically complex, but
complexity is a vice not a virtue when it is more complex than it needs to
be, and in the life sciences you constantly see the silly Rube Goldberg
ways Evolution chose to get things done. I've already given the example of
hormones and there are plenty more. The vagus nerve connects the brain to
the larynx, in a giraffe the two organs are less than a foot apart but its
vagus nerve is more than 15 feet long because it runs all the way down the
neck and then double backs and goes back up the neck to the larynx. No
human designer would be that stupid. And the design of the vertebrate eye
is even sillier.

John K Clark
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20200216/e9dba10b/attachment.htm>


More information about the extropy-chat mailing list