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PEREGAEA
If intelligence is how, consciousness is why. Animals, from single
celled creatures to primates, find the ecological niche they survive in
best through natural selection. How they extract information from their
environment via whatever senses they might evolve shapes the nature of
their consciousness. What they then learn to do with this information
in order to acquire more resources at least cost, then defines the
measure of their intelligence. PereGaea,
with its nearly 300 drawings, looks at these questions of consciousness
and intelligence by tracing the course of evolution on the fictional
world of PereGaea, perhaps more electronic than organic, from simple
inert objects to something that at least resembles consciousness. The
concepts it describes are `hardware independant', that is, they may be
relevant to any kind of information processing and storage system, not
necessarily that of `brains' or `computers'. Indeed, I sometimes wonder
if the current obsession with how the human brain works isn't actually
impeding our enquiry into the nature of consciousness. Trying to copy
the flight of birds proved unwise during the early development of
powered flight; jumbo jets do not cruise near the speed of sound by
flapping their wings. Perhaps we need to actually try and build a
conscious machine if we can. Peregaea suggests a possible approach. Trying to determine whether or not such a machine is actually `conscious' should itself teach us a great deal.
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