Ask A Genius 302 – Sensory Systems and Consciousness (1)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/26
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Off tape in the past, we’ve talked about sensory apparatuses, which is indicating you know consciousness. What do you mean by that?
Rick Rosner: Well all right before we get to that let’s talk about the eyes. People have always been well the eyes are a big deal to people, you know the eyes were to all of history what the but is now just a focus of human interest. And you know they’re the windows to the soul, t it’s often the key you know for an actor that you know whether you know you can people think they can tell whether somebody’s smart or not by looking telling the truth or not looking into their eyes, there’s just a lot of information there. And they’re used by both of them, by evolutionists and creationists to make their points. Creationists argue that the eyes are so perfect that they had to be created, they couldn’t have evolved. And then evolutionists are like look how many freaking times throughout the history of evolution that eyes have evolved? And I mean they evolved like crazy I don’t know how much different along how many different lineages and how many different forms eyes have evolved but it has to be my own pushing a dozen? Where eyes are there’s an easy path, an easy evolutionary path to eyes in every step along the way from having no eyes whatsoever to having eyes is helpful to the organism that’s taking each step. You know sensitivity to light some kind of eye spot but really that does nothing lens or anything it just it feels the intensity of light that’s helpful and then every little incremental improvement is helpful to the organism, that has that incremental you know advantage over others of its type.
And apparently based on the history of evolution there is there are mutations that allow this to happen just eyes are I don’t think we can call the easy evolve but they are a frequent evolve unlike say wheels, wheels almost never evolve. And even though you can imagine that a wheeled organism you know might have significant advantages in certain environments or not who knows. But there’s an – I’d like to use eyes and other sensory apparatus to just make the quick case for technical consciousness.
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