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When we speak about ‘learning’, we should be as clear as possible, as the word has several meanings. A lot of non-conscious things display pseudo-intelligent actions. Pretty much any life on Earth except for animals is just a biological automaton akin to a bot in a videogame, whose seemingly intelligent actions are just a sophisticated code in some programming language. The difference is, while the bot is designed that way, in case of life the natural selection promotes the efficient paterns of behavior, which usually leads to increased complexity and emergence of patterns. It is the ultimate brute force method, but over large periods of time, it works well. Genetic algorithms, purely mathematical thing, are based on this principle of trial and error. Consciousness appears to be nothing more than just another step in this and while it is very special to us, it is just an arbitrary trait, which happened to be useful at some point. But I can’t stress enough, how all of this is pretty much irrelevant to our actual lives. Our experiences are still very real to us, whether we have some ethereal component or not.
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