THOMAS DOW
2.4K posts

THOMAS DOW
@01001001AmAlive
You don't win if you don't play, you can't win once you start.

















The Dawkins' article excerpt that everyone SHOULD have been quoting is this. This is the real question he's worrying at: "As an evolutionary biologist, I say the following. If these creatures are not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for? When an animal does something complicated or improbable — a beaver building a dam, a bird giving itself a dustbath — a Darwinian immediately wants to know how this benefits its genetic survival. In colloquial language: What is it for? What is dust-bathing for? Does it remove parasites? Why do beavers build dams? The dam must somehow benefit the beaver, otherwise beavers in a Darwinian world wouldn’t waste time building dams. Brains under natural selection have evolved this astonishing and elaborate faculty we call consciousness. It should confer some survival advantage. There should exist some competence which could only be possessed by a conscious being. My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism. If Claudia really is unconscious, then her manifest and versatile competence seems to show that a competent zombie could survive very well without consciousness. Why did consciousness appear in the evolution of brains? Why wasn’t natural selection content to evolve competent zombies?"






