[extropy-chat] Qualia Bet.

[Damien Broderick]

At 01:43 AM 11/24/2005 -0500, John K Clark wrote:

>"Brent Allsop" <allsop at extropy.org>
>
>>Phenomenal properties are most definitely causal.
>
>Then the Turing Test should work.
>
>>It's just that the causal part, is the only part that traditional
>>cause and effect observation can detect.
>
>Ok let's talk about the non causal part, the part that you think is so
>important. I'm going to repeat what I said before because you didn't respond
>to it and I think it's an absolutely devastating criticism: If Natural
>Selection can't see it how can Natural Selection select for it?

I have no reason to suppose that phenomenological aspects of reality--the 
experience of self and world, however compromised, mediated and 
partial--are acausal or intrinsically mysterious. But the best science 
assures us that at the deepest levels of reality, quantum events are simply 
stochastic: they don't just look random, they *are* random, one by one 
(something John has noted in other posts). Everything built from them is 
thus riddled with acausality, so natural selection has no option but to 
include this feature of the world. If somehow acausality then re-emerges at 
the macro level, and is useful for survival, as I think Penrose would 
assert, then evolution will conserve the genomes that happen to concentrate 
and utilize this trick. That's my guess, anyway. Of course, maybe (even 
probably) there is no such high-level acausality, or maybe if there is it 
has nothing to do with human experience. But the idea doesn't seem to me 
ridiculous on its face.

Damien Broderick