🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct1.200238.23660@ttinews.tti.com> jackson@soldev.tti.com (Dick Jackson) writes:

>I
>and others here I think) find it satisfying to hold that our mental states
>have evolved to enhance our fitness in an exactly parallel way to our
>obviously physical parts. In other words, my introspection, my
>model of your mental states, my feeling of embarassment when you point
>out my error of logic, all make me function in a superior way to a being
>physically similar to myself, but having, perhaps, just a sort of
>"robotic" approach to survival, food gathering, etc. Further, my kind of
>consciousness is the best possible for my kind of species (it it were not,
>better fitted rival models would have chased it out of the competition
>hundreds of generations ago).

You have an over-optimistic view of the capabilities of evolution. It
can do incredible feats of "design" over millenia, but being blind, it
can get trapped in local maxima in its hill-climbing attempts at
optimisation, and in the short term is vulnerable to foolish
compromise. For example, since we breathe and eat with our mouths, it
is very handy to be provided with a locking system which prevents us
breathing our food. Most animals have a very secure locking system for
this. But when humans started speaking, speech was such a great
evolutionary advantage that speech adaptations have sometimes been
made at the cost of others. One of these is that due to recent
speech-directed adaptations of the tongue and throat, we can breathe
our food. It seems that the occasional person choking to death on food
was a small price to pay for speech. And the occasional woman dying in
childbirth is worth that little extra increment of brain size that
makes childbirth so difficult for our species.

Since our kind of consciousness is relatively recent in evolutionary
terms it might well be a bit of a mess. The better models which could
chase it into extinction might require too much re-organisation, i.e.,
a temporary descent down the hill of evolutionary fitness. And even if
these better models one day appear, our basically flawed design may by
then have accrued so many useful accessories as to render it
impregnable. Rather like the current design of internal combustion
engine.

Indeed, improbable though it might be, if one considers qualia to have
evolved because in themselves they confer an advantage, one must
recognise the theoretical possibility that the advantage may have been
purely local, i.e., in the long view they may actually be a mistake,
rather like our inside-out retina.
-- 
Chris Malcolm    cam@uk.ac.ed.aifh          +44 (0)31 650 3085
Department of Artificial Intelligence,    Edinburgh University
5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK                DoD #205