DAVIS@EMBL.BITNET.UUCP (02/16/87)
I'm afraid that Stevan Harnad has still appeared not to grasp the irrelevance of asking 'WHY' questions about consciousness. > ...I am not asking a teleological question or even an evolutionary one. > [In prior iterations I explained why evolutionary accounts of the origins > and "survival value" of consciousness are doomed: because they're turing- > indistinguishable from the IDENTICAL selective-advantage scenario minus > conciousness.] Oh dear. In my assertion that there is a *biological* dimension to the current existence (or illusion of) consciousness, I had hoped that Harnad would understand the idea of evolutionary events being 'frozen-in'. Sure - there is no advantage in a conscious system doing what can be done unconciously. BUT, and its a big but, if the system that gets to do trick X first *just happens* to be conscious, then all future systems evolving from that one will also be conscious. This is true of all aspects of biological selection, and would be true in any context of natural selection operating on an essentially randomn feature generator. There need be NO 'why' as to the fact that consciousness is with us now - there is every reason to suppose that we are looking at a historical accident that is frozen-in by the irreversibility of a system evolving in a biological context. In fact, it may not even be an accident - when you consider the sort of complexity involved in building a'turing- indistinguishable' automaton, versus the slow, steady progress possible with an evolving, concious system, it may very well be that the ONLY reason for the existence of conscious systems is that they are *easier* to build within an evolutionary, biochemical context. Hence, we have no real reason to suppose that there is a 'why' to be answered, unless you have an interest in asking 'why did my random number generator give me 4.5672 ?'. Consciousness appears to be with us today - the > justification for the conscious interpretation of the "how" < (Harnad) is simply this: - as individuals we experience self-consciousness, - other system's behaviour is so similar to our own that we may reasonably make the assumption of conscioussness there too, - the *a priori* existence of conciousness is supported by (i) our own belief in our own experience and hence (ii) the evolutionary parrallels with other biological features such as the pentadactyl limb, globin and histone structures and the use of DNA. Voila - Occam's razor meets the blind watchmaker, and gives us conscious machines, not because there is any reason 'why' this should be so, but just because it worked out like that. Like it - or lump it! As for the question of knowledge & consciousness: I did not intend the word 'know' to be used in its epistemological sense, merely to point out that our VAXcluster has access to information, but (appears not to) KNOW anything. The mystery of the 'C-1' is that we can be aware, that it is 'like something to be us', period. We don't know how yet,and we will probably never know why beyond the likelihood of our ancestral soup bowl being pretty good at coming up with bright ideas, like us! (no immodesty intended here.....) regards, Paul Davis netmail: davis@embl.bitnet wetmail: embl, postfach 10.2209, 6900 heidelberg, west germany petmail: homing pigeons to ......