On 8/4/2013 4:49 PM, Thane Plambeck wrote:
here is a (presumably hopeless) attempt to define consciousness.
it's a cruel world that wants to eat you. consciousness seems to me to be an adaptive darwinian illusion that organizes your ultimately biological responses to threats in full consonance with the laws of physics, and favors the transmission of your genes to future generations. although some debate it, it seems clear to me that animals have something like it, and even insects, or bacteria, or even a finite automaton transducer that keeps a simple state somehow in memory and responds to external stimuli in consonance with physics. and just as they might have an ever more primitive consciousness than ours, it seems just as likely that much "higher" forms could exist, also.
That strikes me as a definition of intelligence. I think intelligence and consciousness are related but not identical. Human like intelligence, symbolic reasoning, is related to language which in turn is related to being a social animal and being able to manipulate objects. So, for example, a solitary predator like a tiger might gain a lot by intelligence, but not human like intelligence. Brent