RE: The Philosophy of Mind: Zombies, "radical emergence" and evidence of non-experiential
April 22, 2018 at 7:53 am
(This post was last modified: April 22, 2018 at 7:54 am by The Grand Nudger.)
(April 22, 2018 at 7:46 am)Hammy Wrote:You do realize that you just contradicted yourself from sentence to sentence...right?(April 22, 2018 at 6:57 am)Khemikal Wrote: While consciousness may possess no computational utility (I doubt this as well..but I'm running with it to avoid truly useless disagreement), evolutionary utility is a whole different bag of worms, don't you think? Can you look at the civilization around you, all of it, all of human civilization...this monolithic edifice to human consciousness (however imperfectly described or known), and convince yourself that it conferred no reproductive advantages whatsoever?
No I couldn't but I never said otherwise and that doesn't interact with any of my points or analogies. The point is that consciousness as qualia, doesn't appear to have any evolutionary utility,
Quote:I'm not denying that obviously many other things have evolutionary utility. The point is precisely that the things that do have evolutionary utility appear to have all that utility without qualia and qualia doesn't appear to have any evolutionary utility at all... despite it being the most real thing in the universe.......reproductive advantage is evolutionary utility. Art, society, civilization is evolutionary utility. The latter advantages us as a population, the former advantages us -within- a population. If you can conclude that some portion of any of that is derived from consciousness (however you define or describe it..I could maintain that consciousness was a ghostly soul and it wouldn't alter the evolutionary utility of that x)......then consciousness is not useless...in an evolutionary context.
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