Why Are We Conscious?
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Being conscious confers a survival benefit (adaptations or mutations which confer a survival benefit tend to be passed on because those organisms tend to reproduce more often than those lacking such-sorry to be so basic) which over the eons developed in fits and starts and has various levels and stages. That is all there is to it.
Your faith in Darwin is precious, but you simply assert that there’s a survival value, leaving a description of the mechanism out.
I’m left with the original question: “WHY are we conscious?” How specifically does it confer survival value over a creature acting, in a sense, robotically?
What Jake says is makes enough sense to me, perhaps because “why” questions like this confuse me as to what is really being asked. As you point out, it invites a presumption of some invisible intent or force (like God) as a way to answer the why question. I’m still with you on your suggestion that consciousness might be an accident, but imo, having consciousness requires a lot of processing of environmental input and internal sensations, i.e. awareness of what’s going on, and then some calculating process or even cognition that plans out and executes behavior. (Maybe I stated that backwards. Consciousness may be required in order to accomplish those things.) I added my answer to the mysterious question of “why do humans have such a seemingly preternaturally high level of consciousness” because I think it’s a fascinating question, and I feel like I understand some explanations for why we have these higher levels of consciousness: mainly, we have a highly evolved culture. Culture now has a life of its own, and is the reason for our modernization, including intellectual and scientific advancements, and the ability to ask these questions about ourselves, and understand ourselves more than any other animal. And these higher levels of consciousness are mostly invented by us, and they are not always good for us. They are certainly not necessarily good for us.
Let me boil it down to this: I am talking about “consciousness” as “having an experience.” I know I’m having an experience. But I don’t know about you or Jake or Davis or Strega or anyone else. It seems to me that they you all could simply be behaving much as a very sophisticated Turing machine would, but I don’t think a Turing machine would be having an experience. It would just be executing some software.
Speaking of myself now, it seems to me that my own consciousness is gratuitous as well. Indeed, all the relevant stuff about my behavior goes on behind the scenes, in my brain and nervous system. It goes on and THEN I become aware of it. There’s nothing for my consciousness to do but be aware of it. (In fact, come to think of it, a lot of what I do I’m unaware of anyway. Indeed, a lot of what we all do is done “on automatic.”
Unseen, that guy you linked is a believer. God this…god that…says he. Barf! You say to me that my faith in Darwin is precious. Do you have faith in god? Is that the source of consciousness? Has she imbued her special creation with a rich inner world? The speaker asserts that neuroscience will never explain consciousness to which i say bull von ticky shit! In humans as in other animals consciousness is purely biological and derived of natural processes through evolution. Animals who are more aware and more capable of learning have a better chance to reproduce and survive. Thus… I think i understand your position derived i assume from Libet’s experiment that we experience or decide after the issues have been decided. And if that is true how is it that we have or need consciousness? How does it further survival since an automaton otherwise identical to us would be equally functional? Where is the survival value in the add-on of consciousness? To which i say we lack the knowledge presumably of neuroscience and evolutionary biology to describe or explain how it has come to be. But it has come to be we all concede. The simplest explanation is where our bias ought to be. That speaker you linked thinks it is a fundamental aspect of the universe like gravity and space time. How rich! How can any of us respect a “thinker” who posits god? What would lead any of us to that kind of thinking? It is fundamentally the perspective of special creation thinking. Look how wild and inexplicable we humans are with our rich inner world of experiences! Woo, pass the bong. But as i previously indicated evolution has produced wondrous capabilities in bioluminescence, echolocation, etc. So it is with consciousness-another wondrous result of evolution.
He’s religiou. OK, but so what? Father Lemaitre promulgated The Big Bang. Gregor Mendel, a monk, founded the field of genetics. Another monk, William of Ockham invented Occam’s Razor. Copernicus and, presumably, even Isaac Newton were religious as well.
My argument is basically logical and would be forceful even if Libet’s work hadn’t provided fodder. It’s that there seems no need for creatures to be conscious for them to behave in rather complicated ways, including interacting with each other and their environment. Turing implied that it might be possible to build a machine that can simulate human conversation. And, I might add, have no experiences whatsoever.
When he gets to the issue of what he calls zombies (not defined in the TV/movie or Haitian sense), he asks how does he know that anyone else other than h has experiences? While there’s currently no way to prove it one way or the other, it’s certainly logically possible that everyone else operates without having experiences. Being aware, in a sense, without being aware of being aware, as it were.
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