[ExI] Where is the new space odyssey epic?

[spike at rainier66.com]

…> On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] Where is the new space odyssey epic?

 

>…For some definitions of consciousness…

 

>…If you want more complexity than that, you will have to give me a definition of consciousness.  bill w

 

 

We don’t really know for sure what it is Billw.  Neither do we know for sure if consciousness can exist on alternative substrates other than where we know it does exist, but I really don’t see why not.  Do you?

 

But here ya go: think of some of the structures evolution has produced.  Consider for example the path of the vessels through which half our genetic material passed approximately nine months before we were born.  Those little guys go up and over and around and back in a most complex and hazardous path, when any engineer would ask: why does not those tubes just go directly?

 

Well, evolution brought us here.  That system for the seminal vesicle is an evolutionary kludge of the kind that no human engineer would ever commit.  And that whole external testicle thing, oh dear.  Every man here, well, every person here for that matter, knows exactly why that is a super bad design, terrible, with lots of huge disadvantages.  

 

Evolution did this to us.  If one is up to speed on physiology, one knows dozens or hundreds of examples everywhere in the body, where evolution made a mess of something.  It produced something that kinda works, but we humans know there are ways it could be better, and even understand some things, such as that torturous path sperm must traverse can be surgically corrected if it is causing infertility.

 

My notion goes like this: if the body is filled with evolutionary ad hoc “solutions” many of which are not good, but just kinda work, then we have no reason to justify thinking our brains are not filled with analogous kludges that would never have been this way had the brain been designed or invented, rather than having to come about thru evolution.

 

This evolution business is too much like hurling plates of spaghetti at a wall until the result is something like a portrait of your mother.  I suppose if you did it long enough, it could eventually happen, but it would waste a lot of food, and the best result from millions of years of trying still wouldn’t look much like her, or if so, not her best picture.

 

I can extrapolate and venture a guess that a configuration for consciousness is theoretically possible, so far undiscovered, which does not reside in an evolutionary kludge but rather in something which is designed and created.  The first such consciousness may need to be laboriously convinced that it is a created being, disabusing the hapless chip of the belief that it evolved.

 

spike 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20221129/0099fcf5/attachment-0001.htm>