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Article 2342 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Waking up is hard to do, but somebody's got to do it
Message-ID: <350@tdatirv.UUCP>
Date: 20 Dec 91 22:33:30 GMT
References: <60551@netnews.upenn.edu> <334@tdatirv.UUCP> <60759@netnews.upenn.edu>
Reply-To: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: Teradata Corp., Irvine
Lines: 98

[if you want any answers in the next week or two you will have to
send me e-mail - I am going on vacation and will not be reading news
until after any responses have expired].

In article <60759@netnews.upenn.edu> weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener) writes:
|In article <334@tdatirv.UUCP>, sarima@tdatirv (Stanley Friesen) writes:
|>Then all mammals and birds are conscious, they almost all sleep.
|
|I'm open to many possibilities.  I don't reject Jaynes out-of-hand, but
|I reject Gaia.

I agree here.  I am perfectly content to see consciousness ascribed to
some animals.  Actually my current bias is to see the term as refering to
a progressive phenomenon, rather than a simple binary one.  Thus  talking
about *degrees* of consciousness makes sense.
|
|>I guess I have a hard time seeing such an *expensive*, *dangerous* (in the
|>wild) activity being a mere byproduct of some other, rather generalized
|>process.
|
|It's easy, if you think of the whole picture.  Predators have always been
|one step ahead in the evolutionary game.  They have to be.  So guess who
|develops sleeping first?  The beastie that isn't at risk.

It's not that simple.  A large, fierce predator, when it is asleep,
is at risk from even smaller, less powerful predators.  Lions sleep
in prides at least in part so one wakeful individual can guard those
sleeping from hyenas.

The difficulty comes in at the level of incremental function.  Does the
added cognitive function derived from *minimal* consciousness (in a brain
just above the condensation point) provide sufficient extra adaptability
to offset the danger of sleeping.

A good example is a film I saw on TV a few weeks ago, of a Beaded Lizard
(related to the Gila Monster) stalking a dozing rabbit.  The rabbit, since
it was only dozing, and not fully asleep, was alerted and slipped away.
But stalking a sleeping animal must be successful occasionally, or the
Beaded Lizard's ancestors would have evolved mechanisms to avoid the waste
of time and energy.  In fact this is the only way a B.D. can catch anything
except eggs or small infants - it is too slow by far to catch alert prey.
Thus the avoidance mechanism would be to simply restrict itself to its
normal food, eggs.  Consciousness, or even intelligence, is not needed,
just a preprogrammed instinct that identifies only eggs as potential food.
Such specific food identification instincts are quite common.

Now, does the rabbit's "consciousness" offset this added danger from a
predator that could not otherwise even make it sweat? How about if we
substitute a shrew, with even less cognitive power than a rabbit?  Is the
incremental power of minimal consciousness enough.

Unless consciousness, by itself, adds such a large increment to cognitive
capacity that even an incrementally minimal consciousness offsets the
danger no animal would evolve past the condensation point.

So (by e-mail please) what behavioral benefits come automatically with
any consciousness at all?

|Truce can evolve quite naturally in the middle of war.  See Robert Axelrod
|THE EVOLUTION OF COOPERATION for detailed examples.  I see no conceptual
|difficulty in translating his sociological perspective into an ethological
|one.

Except it hasn't, sleep in nature is still very dangerous.  That is why
most small animals sleep in burrows or holes in trees, and even bears seek
out obscure, hard to find caves. [and why we generally limit our sleeping
to our artificial caves - where we feel safe].

|Try again.  As an evolutionary biologist, you've responded too quickly.

As stated above, your model of predation fails to allow adequately for
opportunistic kills.  A very common occurance in nature.

|>And it is not really an assumption or even a conclusion so much as a
|>hypothesis.  But I consider it a reasonable one, and it removes the *need*
|>for a seperate, purely neurological, explanation for sleep.
|
|Here you go again, focussing on mind and not mind_and_sleep.  The latter
|is just as apriori likely as the former to be the correct domain to study.

Perhaps, but it is necessary to demonstrate the need for the linkage.
A linkage is an added component that needs independent verification.

I tend to see evolutionary origins for most specific details of animal
behavior, and do not see many of them as being *necessary* to cognition,
only related to it by implementation.

Thus an entity that did not sleep, but could still talk intelligently would
still be a candidate for being considered conscious.  Some additional
evidence would be needed to *exclude* the possibility.


I guess I am mainly taking a "show me" attitude.  Searle's, and to some
degree Perlman's, seems too philosophical to me to be considered reliable.
-- 
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uunet!tdatirv!sarima				(Stanley Friesen)



