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Emotions are the part of thought that escapes our own self-analysis,
but they are, nonetheless, logically derived, we simply have no direct
overview of precisely how we arrive at them, not enough extra processing
power to both reason our way to them, and also analyze that reasoning
itself.
Such a limit is true of anything finite.
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Animals are NOT conscious, because if they were, and I mean in the same
manner as we call it so, they would actively seek our recognition and
company and try desperately to win our acknowledgement of their
awareness so that we would not eat them or let them die.
Do they have something below the sophistication of what we call
consciousness? Surely, and many levels of it besides, but if you can
attempt to imagine yourself failing to realize the importance of
wanting humans to know you are a thinking being, then THAT IS the
level at which they are NOT working, and that seems quite a ways
down the ladder from us, too far, in fact, to recognize as anything
LIKE ourselves anything THAT unaware.
They would be active, but NON-CONSCIOUS, and so they are, except
perhaps for mere glimmerings in apes, elephants, and cetaceans.
I would define intelligence as the ability to solve new problems. By
this definition, computers are not intelligent because they cannot
program themselves.
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Humans can't either. They are "programmed" by their experiences.
What you're fishing for is consciousness, which is the internal
self-modeling in an alternate real space produced by interrelations
of non-contemporaneous memory accesses.
Isn't intelligence something gradual? I mean, since humans (by
definition intelligent) evolved from amoebae (not intelligent), at some
point along the way, a threshold of "intelligence" was crossed. But I
don't think it would be like flicking a switch. Rather, I think
consciousness, like intelligence, is on a greyscale.
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Nonsense. It achieves subtlety the same way the brain has done, by the
evolution of new kinds of brain matter, so that we need new kinds and
uses of memory to achieve any single step-wise leap of the break
barriers of potential to install yet a higher level of subtlety.
Consciousness is a matter of internal modeling of oneself in a new
kind of space, an imagination, which requires a separate attention to
the very self that is perceiving, as yet another object to consider.
Animals don't realize what we are doing, because nobody can tell them,
and they are probably insufficiently intelligent.
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They don't realize what THEY are doing, let alone what WE are doing.
And given that
"intelligent" humans can't be bothered to rectify the planet and create
a just society, why should animals bother? Animals just look out for
themselves, just like humans. No, human intelligence still has a way to
go, at least judging by the chimp the Americans chose as their president.
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We have improved things somewhat over the random luck of the individual
in this new level of subtlety by acting as a group, which can choose to
alter outcomes, while the individual is determined and programmed by
its experiences, and is unable. You see, we can change others, and act
as a group to change others, but we cannot act to change ourself
simply because we ARE ourself, and that's circular and futile, we
are already what we are and cannot change lest we have been changed
from without. There is no such thing as "Free Will". It's nonsense.
Whatever we think we cannot change by whim, or else we would have
already.
-Steve
