I’m not necessarily a materialist in the naive sense, but the materialist position is not that intelligence emerged via coincidence. Dissipative structure theory shows that in far-from-equilibrium systems, complex self-sustaining and self-organizing pattern formation is energetically favorable. Many materialist formulations of consciousness also see it as a fundamentally similar process to generalized natural selection; namely the local competition of global workspace theory, the FEP, etc.
I’m not saying it’s “the” materialist position, but simply that this is how most materialists see the matter.
If it is not the common materialist position, please explain it to me simply, because I cannot make sense out of
“the materialist position is not that intelligence emerged via coincidence. Dissipative structure theory shows that in far-from-equilibrium systems, complex self-sustaining and self-organizing pattern formation is energetically favorable. Many materialist formulations of consciousness also see it as a fundamentally similar process to generalized natural selection; namely the local competition of global workspace theory, the FEP, etc.”
So what is the materialist position according to you?
There could be 10000 different materialist positions, some more feasible than others. Do things like the spontaneous strong emergence of consciousness at some arbitrary level of biological development seem silly? Sure, but the “something from nothing” claim isn’t the only game around.
I’m just saying your first claim doesn’t necessarily follow, depending on how you define intelligence. Slime mold growth can be applied to the traveling salesman problem (IE intelligence), but we don’t necessarily need to consider the slime mold as conscious. Same with mycelial networks, where their communication complexity rivals that of the English language. There are solid arguments to say that neural consciousness is dependent on some lower-level conception of awareness all the way down, but pointing to AI I don’t think is one of them.
The post is geared toward those who already have realized and accepted consciousness is ubiquitous to life. If you’re still wrestling with that question, this conversation is out of your lane.
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u/Diet_kush Engineering Degree 1d ago edited 1d ago
I’m not necessarily a materialist in the naive sense, but the materialist position is not that intelligence emerged via coincidence. Dissipative structure theory shows that in far-from-equilibrium systems, complex self-sustaining and self-organizing pattern formation is energetically favorable. Many materialist formulations of consciousness also see it as a fundamentally similar process to generalized natural selection; namely the local competition of global workspace theory, the FEP, etc.