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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 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.

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.

consciousness can be seen as the counterweight to emotions, so it can have survival utility

There is no widely agreed upon functional utility of being conscious. The zombie thought experiments are about this.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

>but that it may not be necessary to keep

fixed that for me. too late for edit.

Is your "interior" just the mental model we have of the world (including ourselves)? If so, it's not surprising that evolution selected for it. It's advantageous to be able to make predictions about the world (including ourselves), and to make predictions about a thing you need a model of the thing.

True, but what is surprising is that there is something "it is like" to be that interior. As an example: CPUs can perform calculations on data we consider "representations". The outcome of those calculations, in turn, affect the world. We suspect that they do this without there ever being something it is like to be a CPU.

At first blush, we would suppose that neurons firing this way and that to create actionable representations would have the same property. Evolution would be happy. But there's something extra there: it FEELS like something to be a neural network in a sequence of evolving states. Why? The heretical hypothesis is that the feeling itself had a purpose and was part of the system.

> True, but what is surprising is that there is something "it is like" to be that interior.

I don't know; is there? How do I tell?

I mean, I know what I experience, but I'm not an objective observer. There's evidence that what we perceive as the continuous stream of events is actually assembled in our memory after the fact from various out-of-order sensory inputs.

How do I know that what I perceive as consciousness (and remember, I have no way of knowing whether it's the same as what anyone else perceives, or whether they perceive it at all) is anything more than just wishful thinking? And that's a serious question to which I really want an answer.

That seems more relevant to the quality of information being felt, not the feeling itself. Even if it's just assembled in memory later, it's still felt, there is still a "it is like".

The presence of feeling is rather obvious when you feel things like pain. Can't exactly make that up. That's definitely there. A lot of problems are grounded in feeling itself and wouldn't exist if nobody felt anything.

Proving its presence in other people is impossible, but it would seem very strange that you work one way and everyone else works a completely different way without some outside system tinkering with it.

> The presence of feeling is rather obvious when you feel things like pain. Can't exactly make that up.

At the risk of repeating myself --- do I feel it?

I cannot remember pain. I can remember being in pain, I can remember second-order things about the pain, like where it is or what kind it is. I can remember that it makes me unable to concentrate, and even a mild headache will make me useless even though I'm not physically debilitated. I can remember that cutting myself feels different to toothache, which feels different from that ghastly time when I had shingles (second-stage chickenpox. The most pain I had ever been in my entire life. And I had a mild case).

I know it was nasty, and I'm certainly going to avoid it, but when I'm not actually in pain, I cannot summon up even a shadow of a sensation of what the pain itself was actually like. Which is weird, because I can remember other sensations. But not pain.

So it's not obvious that I feel pain. Maybe it doesn't exist at all, and all it is is an illusion formed by my brain's negative reinforcement signal ('this is bad. Stop doing this'). That would at least explain why it doesn't show up in my memory.

> I know it was nasty, and I'm certainly going to avoid it, but when I'm not actually in pain, I cannot summon up even a shadow of a sensation of what the pain itself was actually like.

That's physical pain, but if you try that with emotional pain I'll be you can feel it just fine and quite literally re-live it.

I think that's more that you can literally re-inflict emotional pain by thinking about it, rather than that you're just remembering the pain itself.

I share your bafflement at trying to recall pain, I can't do it to any fidelity either. But I actually think that this is not unique among sensations, and most of our memories are about as hazy as this. I can remember that I did or saw or smelled things, but I can't exactly reproduce the sensations/images. I also have to disagree with the logic of the following:

> Maybe it doesn't exist at all, and all it is is an illusion formed by my brain's negative reinforcement signal ('this is bad. Stop doing this'). That would at least explain why it doesn't show up in my memory.

It doesn't matter whether pain is an illusion, we can easily recall visual illusions.

Perhaps feeling is a more effective way to convey information.

I suspect you're exactly right.

>We suspect that they do this without there ever being something it is like to be a CPU.

Maybe there is, and every process has an interior. The ones that lack concepts like learning, feelings, memories, building representations, etc, aren't fundamentally different but are just boring and don't tend to affect the world in self-reflective ways. Like comparing a cellular automata where all cells start dead and stay dead to Conway's game of life.

The mathematical universe hypothesis[0] and the novel Permutation City by Greg Egan don't put it this way but I can't help feeling they're related and worth looking into.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...

What about the idea often proposed by Graham Hancock where consciousness is not generated in the brain but rather the brain is a sort receiver for it?

That leaves the question of where is consciousness, then.

That's an idea with zero evidence and thus indistinguishable from fantasy.

Hard to square that idea away with observable concepts like how hormones and brain damage affect people. One could say that the brain does all the computation, and the link to consciousness is one-way, but if that consciousness-link isn't affecting the physical computation, then that doesn't explain why our brain makes us talk about being conscious. That consciousness-link-thing would be entirely unrelated to why we talk about being conscious and should be called something else.

Then we should be able to detect the transmissions and build other receivers. Or we should be able to block the transmissions, or generate new ones. If this hypothesis were true, it should be very easy to construct tests for it but as far as I am aware nothing is forthcoming.

Isn't time what we experience because we have memory? I think my consciousness is the state I got into because of the experiences I had due to interactions. Brain is finite state machine. Finite because it is limited to states of universe. Even if I live near a black hole I may only live 70 years in local time experienced, which may equal to like 1000 years in Earth's local time experienced.

I think its the underlying physics that shapes our thinking. Basically its all physics rules how particles/sub-particles/super-particles interact and the energy flowing through it. Now am "I" in control of making decision to do one thing and not the other? Or was it inevitable that the decision was made as that was the only possible outcome of particles inter acting in my brain at that moment? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13012952

I was watching videos of elephants in wild. They are just the same like us. I saw a group of elephants finding a waterhole, but the food was scarce. They could water the plants in nearby area to produce more food. They just haven't figured it out yet. Just like us they pass around information using their language. They do not have language for what they have not figured out yet. They will have that capability once they figure out something and find the need to communicate it. Any organism I take I see behavior that is very much ours if we too lacked such knowledge and technique. Our communication latencies are decreasing steadily with advancement of tech as we figure out more things. Now when we have the tech to naturally communicate with each other the exact same thought with all the context of that thought to somebody instant or in realtime as it happens, then we are essentially a super organism. Each of us can be equated to neurons in brain with each of us having many neurons with each neuron having many molecules interacting with each which has atoms interacting.

HN is like a place where I find information I value more. Many quality ideas from all around Earth. When I try communicate with my sister to clarify some doubt she has, I often tries to explain to her why something is so with all the context. She couldn't intake all the data I provide as fast as I provide it(keep up with me) and within a minute or two she's like STOP! People want just exactly only what they ask for. Everything else is considered noise.