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From: yuqun@nordica.princeton.edu (Yuqun (Michael) Chen)
Subject: Re: Thought Question
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vlsi_lib@netcom.com (Gerard Malecki) writes:

>What are living beings made of? Atoms. What do atoms want to do? Get into
>stable configurations, presumably. If they can find bliss in forming 
>simple, stable structures like methane, why should they bother evolving
>into more and more complex structures (a.k.a. life)? After all, even 
>when one animal eats another, the atoms of the prey have nothing to lose
>(they quickly form new chemical bonds within the predator). So are such
>things as suffering of the prey just imagined? As you have indicated,
>consciousness is not necessary for survival (plants, even the insectivorous
>ones, for example). Maybe there is such a thing as quanta of consciousness
>residing in each atom. And each atom wants to be part of a complex organism
>rather than a simple one. And the consciousness of the whole organism is
>probably the collecive efforts of all the individual atoms (am I beginning
>to sound like Penrose here?). Consciousness-merging is an established fact
>in neurology, mainly through experiments involving the corpus callosum.


I think evolutionism alone cannot explain the development of
consciousness. If we view evolution as a force to drive organisms and
the environ to a stable state, we human beings probably would never
have come into being. I think it was occassional perturbations such as
UV causing gene mutations that produced imbalances in the state of
Nature; and then Evolution propelled the newly-created organisms to
perfect and "excel", or the old organisms to adapt to the new
environ. I am pretty sure that you can find my arguments somewhere in
the literature.


"ln -s cs.princeton.edu:~official/Standard_disclaimer ~/.disclaimer"

Yuqun Chen
Department of Computer Science
Princeton University
-- 
Yuqun (Yuchwin) Chen
Department of Computer Science
35 Olden Street
Princeton, NJ 08544
