Re: intellignece and conciousness, the one implies the other?

Traveler <traveler@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> The logical problem with a philosophy in which the entire universe is
> conscious to one degree or another is that there no such thing as an
> unconscious physical process.

That's not a logic problem. That's a language problem.

> It's like having left without right or
> up without down. Heck, even electrons would be conscious just because
> they react to EM interactions. Which means that even the dead and
> buried are conscious. Somehow, I seriously doubt the validity of this
> hypothesis.

The langauge problem created by the idea of consciousness is not unique.
It's common for most our words. How for example do you define when a
machine becomes a car? How much can you change the machine before you can
no longer call it a car? If you take the engine out of a car, is it still
a car? If you take all the seats out of it and the steering wheel out of
it, is it still a car? What about if you take all the wheels off?

The point is that the word car does not have a well defined border for when
a machine stops being a car. The word is defined more by the center of the
cluster of all machines we might think are a "car". We determine what word
to use to describe a machine not by when it crosses the border from car, to
non-car, but by roughy which word defintion it's closest to. If the
machine is more like a go-cart than a car, we might use the word go-cart to
describe it.

Most our words are in fact used to roughly identify a location in a
continuum which has no divisions. Consciousness is just one of these
words. We define consciousness by how similar things are to humans.

We define unconscious based on how similar things are to rocks. A dead
human is a lot more like a rock than like a living human so we call it
unconscious.

The point of arguing that everything has some degree of consiousness is
just taking the position that consciousness is a continuum. That position
is supported by the fact that we have not yet found anything special about
humans other than the physical configuration to separate their
consciousness from the consciousness of rocks. And physical configuration
of atoms is a continuum.

If you think conciousness is defined by something other than the physical
configuration of the body, then it's up to you to find it and show it to
us, because so far, no one has done that.

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: The Demise of Computationalism?
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