RE: Panpsychism is not as crazy as it sounds.
May 15, 2014 at 9:37 pm
(This post was last modified: May 15, 2014 at 9:43 pm by Coffee Jesus.)
I wasn't off-topic. I was still responding to this bit from the OP.
Knowing that there is consciousness, we can't say that consciousness must have appeared because of the principles of evolution (random mutation + natural selection). We can only say that it must have appeared somehow, even if through the interaction of dozens upon dozens of "random" forces.
With the post hoc knowledge that consciousness did appear, we can say that it probably had a high probability of appearing (allowing for quantum randomness, of course), but we cannot say that consciousness should be probable even if we're pretending to not know things that we really do know, like what evolution is going to produce. You can't place yourself at the dawn of biological life, then say, "We have to imagine that we don't know whether evolution will produce consciousness, but consciousness has to be probable because we know evolution is going to produce it." The implicit assumption is that evolution alone is responsible for consciousness. Consciousness could be due to the interaction of dozens upon dozens of "random" forces that are unrelated to the theory of evolution. The fact that it did happen doesn't indicate that the explanation has to be simple, i.e. that the event had to follow from just a few basic assumptions.
(April 5, 2014 at 8:08 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: Epiphenomenalism seems to run into a Darwinian problem. If consciousness is basically useless, perhaps a "byproduct" of other functions, why did/does evolution select for it?
Knowing that there is consciousness, we can't say that consciousness must have appeared because of the principles of evolution (random mutation + natural selection). We can only say that it must have appeared somehow, even if through the interaction of dozens upon dozens of "random" forces.
With the post hoc knowledge that consciousness did appear, we can say that it probably had a high probability of appearing (allowing for quantum randomness, of course), but we cannot say that consciousness should be probable even if we're pretending to not know things that we really do know, like what evolution is going to produce. You can't place yourself at the dawn of biological life, then say, "We have to imagine that we don't know whether evolution will produce consciousness, but consciousness has to be probable because we know evolution is going to produce it." The implicit assumption is that evolution alone is responsible for consciousness. Consciousness could be due to the interaction of dozens upon dozens of "random" forces that are unrelated to the theory of evolution. The fact that it did happen doesn't indicate that the explanation has to be simple, i.e. that the event had to follow from just a few basic assumptions.
