Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk (Oliver Sparrow)
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!peernews.demon.co.uk!chatham.demon.co.uk!ohgs
Subject: Re: Is CONSCIOUSNESS continuous? discrete? quantized?
References: <departedD3vKy5.M3B@netcom.com> <1995Feb24.152139.3684@galileo.cc.rochester.edu> <kovskyD4J82u.2vI@netcom.com> <1995Feb25.180325.3029@galileo.cc.rochester.edu> <kovskyD4L7An.pn@netcom.com> <1995Feb26.213856.25826@galileo.cc.rochester.edu>
Organization: Royal Institute of International Affairs
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Date: Mon, 27 Feb 1995 08:40:02 +0000
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Why is consciousness an advantage? Well, at one level, it is a parsimonious 
solution to the problem of how to kick-start a newly born complex organism. 
KNowing what we know about genes and neural architecture, it is hard to see how 
features other than the broadly architectural predisposition to self-assemble 
in certain ways can be built into the genes, so a feature which recognises, 
associates and in other ways learns must be adaptive. If such a system is 
capable of cultural learning - acquiring skills by watching Mama, by playing 
with the other pups and so forth - then this is demonstrably advantageous.

Does this *need* consciousness? I suspect that - like beauty, awesomeness or 
the possession of a sense of propriety - consciousness is a word that we use to 
capture a bundle of processes, associations and subjective impressions which 
may have no more in common that that we bundle them together. Some aspects of 
some of what we mean by this word are, however, necessary; and i have, I hope, 
spelled them out in the predceding paragraph.

_________________________________________________

  Oliver Sparrow
  ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk
