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>In the case of humans and animals, consciousness is a way to adapt to the environment to protect their lives, fulfill their needs and eventually reproduce. Con
by vik0 3y ago
>In the case of humans and animals, consciousness is a way to adapt to the environment to protect their lives, fulfill their needs and eventually reproduce. Consciousness is useful for life. But in the case of the sun, what is it adapting to, and what does it have to protect? Nothing.
You sound overly confident with your statement about a topic that has eluded thinkers for millennia and (probably) millennia to come
- Retric 3y agoNo reason to use the derogatory euphemism "thinkers." How about people chasing a dead end to nowhere.
- edgyquant 3y agoHow about: your views on the world aren’t objective and all of those thinkers have way more credibility than you
- Retric 3y agoWhat credibility? As you yourself pointed out they accomplished nothing. Some are quite famous, but that’s irrelevant in the face of thousands of years of utter failure to be more than pure entertainment. Try and find any philosophical statement from all that navel gazing which both means something and is generally accepted as true.
- hackable_sand 3y ago"The reason why heaven and earth are able to endure and continue thus long is because they do not live of, or for, themselves." Lao Tzu
- Retric 3y agoReasonable attempt, but not generally accepted as true. Just ask yourself which philosophies might disagree with that statement, there's quite a long list.
- hackable_sand 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- smokel 3y agoEvolution does not explain consciousness, but it does explain that the article we are discussing is rubbish.
- visarga 3y agoYes, it does. Let's think step-by-step like LLMs. We have self replicators, the most basic form of life. They start to multiply and conquer the environment. This makes resources scarce and competition ensues. In order to compete, they need to adapt, hence they develop consciousness. Its role is to protect the body, and essentially, itself. And they don't have to adapt just to the physical world but also the other agents, which further pushes consciousness to become more sophisticated. Wait a few billion years, and here we are. Why was self replication necessary? To gradually sculpt the consciousness hardware and record what gains it makes, copying the code into the future. The mechanisms in consciousness are the result of many small changes over time, they can't appear suddenly in one single step. Without a copying mechanism (self replication of DNA in our case) it is impossible.
- smokel 3y agoThis might be an explanation of the development of consciousness, but it does little to explain what consciousness actually is. > In order to compete, they need to adapt, hence they develop consciousness. The "hence" here is not a necessary implication. Plants also compete and adapt, but they don't have consciousness. Also, they have not lost the competition with animals. As a whole, I suppose they have better chances of survival than animals.
- wizzwizz4 3y ago> In order to compete, they need to adapt, hence they develop consciousness. This isn't how evolution works. Evolution is not purposeful: adaptions don't occur because adaptions are necessary for the survival of a population group's descendents. If a population doesn't change quickly enough to remain well-suited to its environment, it just dies off: extinction. You seem to like AI, so: evolution is basically a stochastic hill-climbing algorithm. You're describing something closer to intelligent design than evolution.