From: J. R. Molloy (jr@shasta.com)
Date: Wed Jan 16 2002 - 00:17:40 MST
From: "John Clark" <jonkc@worldnet.att.net>
> Animals have been aware of themselves for a very long time,
> certainly the parts of the brain that deal with fear, love, pleasure
> and pain are very old; but it took another 400 million years of
> experimentation before evolution invented true intelligence and
> the creativity it produces.
Yes, so that means that evolution is quite creative, having invented true
intelligence long before humans ever thought of inventing something similar
(AI)... and of course, evolution is not sentient, so it's evident that
creativity can function independently of sentience.
------------------------
From: "John Clark" <jonkc@worldnet.att.net>
> J. R. Molloy <jr@shasta.com> Wrote:
>
> > Nobody is going to pay you for the sentience that you claim to have.
>
> You can't have creativity without intelligence and you can't have
intelligence
> without sentience otherwise evolution would never have invented it, and
> you're wrong, somebody does pay me for that.
Come on, John, I don't believe that anyone pays you just for being sentient.
You can have creativity without sentience, since evolution created you, and
evolution hasn't any genuine intelligence. You *can* have intelligence without
sentience, since John Koza has reported that AI has solved problems, yet
genetic algorithms aren't sentient.
> But you were the one who said the poetry writing program was
> non-sentient, how do you know?
The poetry-writing programs do not *claim* to be sentient.
Do you?
> Sure, but non-sentient beings apparently can't act like sentient ones,
Well, there's Al Gore...
©¿©¬
> at
> least that's what evolution is telling us.
Evolution tells us how life evolved, that's all. If we build non-sentient
beings that act like sentient ones, it matters not at all to the algorithms,
organic chemistry, and Darwinian mechanisms that produced life (including our
own).
> > Superlative sentience is ended the moment the brain is disturbed
> >by thought, which contaminates the purity of awareness.
>
> Then I never want to achieve "superlative sentience", it sounds rather
> pedestrian, just like another run of the mill drug induced stupor.
Superlative sentience (total awareness) can't be "achieved," so you don't have
to worry about achieving it. It emerges spontaneously, and is like nothing
that the brain can imagine, because it coincides with direct experience of
reality, just the opposite of induced stupor.
-------------------------------
From: "John Clark" <jonkc@worldnet.att.net>
> After all sentience is much easier to
> achieve than creativity.
If sentience is easier to achieve than creativity, then sentience naturally
precedes creativity.
So, then what created the sentience?
Obviously, creativity precedes sentience, otherwise evolution could never
create sentience.
--- --- --- --- ---
Useless hypotheses, etc.:
consciousness, phlogiston, philosophy, vitalism, mind, free will, qualia,
analog computing, cultural relativism, GAC, Cyc, Eliza, cryonics, individual
uniqueness, ego, human values, scientific relinquishment, malevolent AI,
non-sensory experience, SETI
We move into a better future in proportion as the scientific method
accurately identifies incorrect thinking.
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