Re: Is Doctor Who "realistic" sci-fi?

On 26 May, 07:06, imipak <imi...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On May 25, 5:16 am, "pbow...@xxxxxxx" <pbow...@xxxxxxx> wrote:





On 25 May, 10:13, imipak <imi...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On May 25, 1:24 am, "pbow...@xxxxxxx" <pbow...@xxxxxxx> wrote:

The conciousness, getting back to the point of interest, is
necessarily an illusion.

On the contrary. Consciousness is necessarily subjective. It's
nonsense to call a purely subjective experience an illusion; the same
with sentience. It's logically nonsense to describe the sensation of
feelings an illusion - it's possible that whatever's prompting those
sensations may be illusory, but the sensation is necessarily real by
virtue of the fact that it's being sensed. For something to be an
illusion implies an objective reality that's being subjectively
misperceived, not a subjective experience which is by definition
subjective.

To stick with the brevity thing, I'll simply
refer to the "disproof" of Artifician Intelligence by means of the
Chinese Room problem, and apply the new information to establish that
a mechanistic model of the brain equals a mechanistic model of
intelligence requires that intelligence is nothing more than an
elaborate numbers game played on a vast scale.

Once again, beside the point. Intelligence has nothing to do with
consciousness. Computer can have fairly advanced decision-making
capabilities, but there's never been such a thing as a conscious
computer.

As for whether something is non-intelligent, I dispute that we've
found anything that matches that definition. Crows can manufacture
elaborate tools from raw materials. Parrots, such as Alex the African
Grey, invented their own notion of zero.

Keep going. So far you've covered two of 10,000 species in one
vertebrate clade; the most recently-evolved one at that...

All kinds of animals have
notions of symbolic rituals.

It's very uncertain whether any, save perhaps elephants and dolphins,
have any "notions" of symbolic rituals. It's also a good idea to be
wary of assuming that because ethologists have adopted a human idea,
such as 'ritual', to describe animal behaviours such as courting and
displaying to rivals, that these represent anything akin to what
humans think of as a 'ritual' from the perspective of any of those
animals that are conscious.

You can go as simple as you like, but
will you ever reach a genuine point of zero? Even studies of single
neurons from higher animals shows that those neurons are capable of
marvellously complex operations, and even a handful is sufficient to
pilot advanced jet flight simulators.

And what of those animals that don't possess neurons? Or plants,
fungi, microbes? For that matter there are plenty of animals with
neurons that don't possess anything resembling a central nervous
system - echinoderms famously lost their brains during their
evolution.

It follows that the simpler the organism, the less ingelligence is
likely to be present, but that there is no organism so simple that we
can assume no intelligence will be present.

Even if this were granted (and there are plenty of organisms whose
behaviour appears to be dictated entirely by physiological responses
to chemical gradients, to which they react deterministically - and
where would a sponge's "intelligence" be located since the animals
exhibit barely any cell differentiation, and certainly nothing as
complex as a neuron), this strays from the point. Intelligence is not
a synonym for consciousness or sentience, and as with the example of
driving a car decision-making may be entirely unconscious. Some
advanced animals appear to be demonstrably non-sentient - frogs react
to motion, but exhibit no fear reaction when handled (something that
lizards, birds and mammals do) and rather unkind experiments in which
an experimenter outside the frog's view pours acid on its legs have
found that frogs exhibit no pain response.

Especially when it comes
to collective organisms, gestalts, etc, where the complexity of an
individual in the organism is not representative of the complexity of
the superorganism.

Again, certainly in the case of collective organisms, you're making
the mistake of reading the descriptions researchers use for ease of
reference literally. You can describe an ant colony as a 'super-
organism' indeed; it's a convenient way to visualise the way
individuals cooperate and organise themselves. But there is no guiding
intelligence or consciousness arising as an emergent property from
these interactions; a colony is not in any literal sense a single
organism, super or otherwise, for all that that concept has made for
entertaining alien depictions down the years.

Phil
.

Relevant Pages

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