Posted by alexandra_k on September 1, 2004, at 19:37:36
This guy is my absolutely favourite author.
"Scene one: The Birth of Boundaries and Reasons
In the beginning there were no reasons; there were only causes. Nothing had a purpose, nothing had so much as a function; there was no teleology in the world at all. The explanation for this is simple: There was nothing that had interests. But after milennia there happened to emerge simple replicators... While they had no inkling of their interests, and perhaps properly speaking had no interests, we, peering back from our godlike vantage points at their early days, can nonarbitrarily assign them certain interests - generated by their defining 'interest' in self-replication... if these simple replicators want to continue to replicate, they should hope and strive for various things; they should avoid the 'bad' things and seek the 'good' things. When an entity arrives on the scene capable of behaviour that staves off, however primitively, its own dissolution and decompisition, it brings with it into the world its 'good'. That is to say, it creates a point of view from which the worlds events can be roughly partitioned into the favourable, the unfavourable, and the neutral. And its own innate proclivities to seek the first, shun the second, and ignore the third contribute essentially to the definition of the three classes. As the creature thus comes to have interests, the world and events begin creating reasons for it - whether or not the creature can fully recognise them. The first reasons preexisted their own recognition. Indeed, the first problem faced by the first problem-facers was to learn how to recognise and act on the reasons that their very existence brought into existence'.
"Consciousness Explained" pp.173-174.
poster:alexandra_k
thread:385403
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/books/20040616/msgs/385403.html