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I think saying that "evolution selected consciousness for a reason" is a potential category error. It seems a bit like saying that evolution selected blood pres

by emtel 10y ago

I think saying that "evolution selected consciousness for a reason" is a potential category error. It seems a bit like saying that evolution selected blood pressure. Evolution selected circulatory systems - blood pressure is an inevitable phenomenon of a circulatory system. Similarly, it might be that evolution selected information processing and decision making systems, and that consciousness might be an inevitable phenomenon of sufficiently complex information processing systems.

breckinloggins 10y ago
That's why I labelled the idea "heretical". I think your explanation is by far the most popular one in science. The idea is that consciousness is an "epiphenomenon" - the "steam of the locomotive". It has no functional purpose. I'm simply suggesting that we try seeing where we go if we reject this hypothesis and instead treat consciousness as a thing that itself has survival utility. Doing so does cause dualism to creep in awfully quickly, but I'm not really so ideologically committed to pure physicalism that I'm unwilling to take the thought experiment seriously.
- untoreh 10y ago
  consciousness can be seen as the counterweight to emotions, so it can have survival utility
  - robotresearcher 10y ago
    There is no widely agreed upon functional utility of being conscious. The zombie thought experiments are about this.
- sooheon 10y ago
  I can't make the leap from evolution selecting for consciousness for some utility to dualism. Can you make that more explicit for me? What you've stimulated for me is the question of whether brains and their processes could have the same utility without the quality of interiority? We can make obvious observations like "the pain of intense heat incentivizes the animal to stop touching fires". Was it necessary that the animal feel the pain, or could the exact same behavioral modification have been duly recorded in some neural adjustment without the interior experience? My personal intuition is that 1. it is possible for a machine with the right interfaces running a sophisticated enough turing machine to replicate the above, and 2. such a turing machine would not have the same quality of interiority that we have. This suggests that consciousness doesn't have some inherent utility. Except! From my internal observations, consciousness seems to have the quality that it focuses inputs and computation. I filter out noise, center my reasoning/recall/attention on one or two things at a time. Perhaps this ability to filter and focus allows for more peak "thought" or "processing" given equal grey matter mass or energy input. So my thesis is that the evolutionary advantage of consciousness is that it was a software based way to extract more performance out of brains given hardware limitations.
  - breckinloggins 10y ago
    > I can't make the leap from evolution selecting for consciousness for some utility to dualism. Can you make that more explicit for me? The philosophical objection to the idea that consciousness is functional is that, it this were so, then consciousness would be able to affect the physical world. I feel this way, and because (and ONLY because) I felt that way I move my arm. But how did my actual "feeling" of anything cause my neural network to exhibit different outward behavior than it would have had I not felt anything at all? From there, the claim is that you need to import dualism (by saying that the world of feelings somehow communicates back with the particles that and energy that make up the neurons). I don't think that's the only way to solve the problem, but it's a common objection.
    - jrv 10y ago
      An argument why I believe consciousness can affect particles/"physics": if it couldn't, why would we be speaking about our internal experiences? If they were only experiences like in a movie, the fact that they exist wouldn't influence anything and our bodies wouldn't talk about them. Yet here I am, typing about internal experiences.
AgentME 10y ago
The novel Blindsight by Peter Watts is great for exploring the relationships between consciousness and intelligence. The characters theorize that consciousness could be an important/easy stepping stone for the evolution of intelligence, but that it may be necessary to keep, and that consciousness could be evolved away from, relegated away like a vestigial organ.
- AgentME 10y ago
  >but that it may not be necessary to keep fixed that for me. too late for edit.

by emtel 10y ago

breckinloggins 10y ago

That's why I labelled the idea "heretical". I think your explanation is by far the most popular one in science. The idea is that consciousness is an "epiphenomenon" - the "steam of the locomotive". It has no functional purpose. I'm simply suggesting that we try seeing where we go if we reject this hypothesis and instead treat consciousness as a thing that itself has survival utility. Doing so does cause dualism to creep in awfully quickly, but I'm not really so ideologically committed to pure physicalism that I'm unwilling to take the thought experiment seriously.

untoreh 10y ago
consciousness can be seen as the counterweight to emotions, so it can have survival utility
- robotresearcher 10y ago
  There is no widely agreed upon functional utility of being conscious. The zombie thought experiments are about this.
sooheon 10y ago
I can't make the leap from evolution selecting for consciousness for some utility to dualism. Can you make that more explicit for me? What you've stimulated for me is the question of whether brains and their processes could have the same utility without the quality of interiority? We can make obvious observations like "the pain of intense heat incentivizes the animal to stop touching fires". Was it necessary that the animal feel the pain, or could the exact same behavioral modification have been duly recorded in some neural adjustment without the interior experience? My personal intuition is that 1. it is possible for a machine with the right interfaces running a sophisticated enough turing machine to replicate the above, and 2. such a turing machine would not have the same quality of interiority that we have. This suggests that consciousness doesn't have some inherent utility. Except! From my internal observations, consciousness seems to have the quality that it focuses inputs and computation. I filter out noise, center my reasoning/recall/attention on one or two things at a time. Perhaps this ability to filter and focus allows for more peak "thought" or "processing" given equal grey matter mass or energy input. So my thesis is that the evolutionary advantage of consciousness is that it was a software based way to extract more performance out of brains given hardware limitations.
- breckinloggins 10y ago
  > I can't make the leap from evolution selecting for consciousness for some utility to dualism. Can you make that more explicit for me? The philosophical objection to the idea that consciousness is functional is that, it this were so, then consciousness would be able to affect the physical world. I feel this way, and because (and ONLY because) I felt that way I move my arm. But how did my actual "feeling" of anything cause my neural network to exhibit different outward behavior than it would have had I not felt anything at all? From there, the claim is that you need to import dualism (by saying that the world of feelings somehow communicates back with the particles that and energy that make up the neurons). I don't think that's the only way to solve the problem, but it's a common objection.
  - jrv 10y ago
    An argument why I believe consciousness can affect particles/"physics": if it couldn't, why would we be speaking about our internal experiences? If they were only experiences like in a movie, the fact that they exist wouldn't influence anything and our bodies wouldn't talk about them. Yet here I am, typing about internal experiences.

AgentME 10y ago

The novel Blindsight by Peter Watts is great for exploring the relationships between consciousness and intelligence. The characters theorize that consciousness could be an important/easy stepping stone for the evolution of intelligence, but that it may be necessary to keep, and that consciousness could be evolved away from, relegated away like a vestigial organ.

AgentME 10y ago
>but that it may not be necessary to keep fixed that for me. too late for edit.