X-Message-Number: 16983
Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 10:13:40 -0700
From: Lee Corbin <>
Subject: Re: Constructive Thinking Without Consciousness?

Olaf Henry writes

>I believe, that the fly or mosquito, which escapes my
>slapping hand has fear, recognizes the approaching danger
>and consciously tries to get away, therefore is conscious.

Then you are forced to admit also little programs that are
very easy to write that appear to flee from your cursor.
In the limit, a bimetallic strip could move away from your
hand to.

Our investigations of the brain reveal a huge number of
extremely intricate mechanisms that probably correlate
with consciousness and the emotions.  The elaborateness
of these mechanisms in lower animals is much less.  That's
one reason that it isn't sensible to believe insects are
consciousness.

A second powerful technique obtains from evolutionary
epistemology.  Consider the claim by some that plants
feel pain.  We refute this by merely asking what possible
benefit would accrue to the genes of plants if the plants
were to feel pain (or be conscious).  The answer is, no
benefit would accrue whatsoever:  the strategy of plants
is to devote all their resources into metabolism and
staying alive.  In a nutshell, nature didn't make a tree
sensitive to getting chopped because there is no action
that the tree can take to prevent it or flee.

Likewise there is not much point to placing the enormous
resources in a single ant to make it have fear.  Fear in
animals is extremely useful for learning, hence for survival,
and therefore for reproduction.  Nature's strategy with ants
is to have them just mindlessly run away when their machinery
senses vibration or other danger.  Nature therefore devotes
all resources to blind reproduction (and those fundamental
activities, like searching for and retrieving food that are
totally necessary to reproduction).

>Others seem to put the limit between man and the rest of the
>fauna, writing all else off as instinct.

They're wrong, of course.  It's very clear that the higher
animals have feeling, and rudimentary (at least) consciousness.

>So here is the reason of this posting, an article in today's The
>Province paper here in Vancouver:

>
>Quote:
>Quack thinking mom rescues her brood
>By Mark Wilson, Staff Reporter

Nice story.  Probably believable.  Dogs, after all, do go get
people to help out in bad situations.  Or at least that's
what I remember from watching "Lassie".

Lee

>Best,
>Olaf
>PS: The ethics of quoting:  If I quote a text verbatim, do I have
>to include spelling and punctuation errors of the original, or am
>I allowed to correct these?  I have done a bit of both in the above
>text. : ^)

P.S. I do NOT think that you must quote errors.  In fact, you are
doing your readers a service by those corrections, taking your
valuable time to save theirs.  Thank you.  You are also doing the 
original poster a favor, by making it appear that he or she
was more knowlegeble or more careful than was actually the case.
Of course, you are not obligated to take these steps, but it is
nice.

If what you are quoting is unclear, do what editors do and place
a better word in [these brackets] either leaving the original
word there in addition or not.  I guess that we should stop there,
not doing any additional rewriting, as tempting as it sometimes is.

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