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#5739·Vincent Brunsch, 13 days agoI agree that shared evolutionary history by itself would not establish that the same “software” is running. But that wasn’t my claim.
My point is that humans inherited from earlier animals many of the same organized systems involved in things like sensory processing, nociception, affect and learning. The emergence of universal creativity could have changed the overall cognitive architecture dramatically without implying that all of those older systems acquired their phenomenal properties only at that same point.
So the laptop analogy shows that common ancestry does not entail identical software, which I agree with. What I don’t think it shows is that the continuity of these particular inherited systems is evidentially irrelevant to whether phenomenal experience may already have been present before universality.
What I don’t think it shows is that the continuity of these particular inherited systems is evidentially irrelevant to whether phenomenal experience may already have been present before universality.
It’s the software that would give rise to consciousness because computation is substrate-independent. So yes, I think hardware continuity is irrelevant (unless there’s a switch from non-universal computer to universal or vice versa).