Blue Devil Knight and those unconscious bee people
This tracks back to a discussion we had with BDK on consciousness and intentionality. My question for him is this: could unconscious bee people have evolved science? Could they form hypotheses, perform experiments, interpret the data, and examine the results to see if their hypotheses were confirmed or disconfirmed, adjust their theories to fit the evidence, etc. etc. etc, all of this without consciousness?
Is it just intutional pie-throwing if I suggest that this is just insane? Furthermore, an affirmative answer would make the hard problem of consciousness harder. Apparently we could do just fine without it, so why do we have it?
Labels: argument from intentionality, Blue Devil Knight, causal theories of intentionality
posted by Victor Reppert @ 9:18 AM
2 Comments
2 Comments:
If it were possible to have science without consciousness, that doesn't mean consciousness doesn't do anything. It also doesn't mean the science would be the same.
Bees represent where nectar is in the world, communicate this to other bees, which respond appropriately. I frankly don't understand the reaction to imagining that this simple capacity were scaled up in ways I said. Especially if we were to add syntactic operations to the scaled up number of elemental contents. We'd have the roots of more interesting thoughts.
But I've discussesd this here a lot and don't hvae the energy to link them all etc..
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