Yeah, it's pretty mind boggling... Amazing that it "works". And I think debugging single-threaded code can be hard. ;-)
As if what applies to us individuals, with our thoughts and actions, also applies to these subsystems of a cell, in a different form.
What could be their motivation to build humans, to assemble brains that can reflect, eyes that can see, senses built to enable interaction with this world?
Where do these instructions come from?
These things don't want anything. It's just the way things work.
If you manage to form an organism that survives better than other organisms, there will be more of you (and your cells). There is no "want" and "like" in evolution, just "works" and "replication".
depends how optimistic/pessimistic you are. I find it far more likely that humans will eventually hit some local maximum in a trough too deep to ever escape.
Yet I may be no more than a replicating machine whose purpose it is to build these new machines which may likely replace us one day, maybe keep us in a zoo, or as pets, if we get lucky.
I can't imagine what motivates these molecules to behave, to group the way they do; why the existing energies get channeled to make them move that way, since there is no need for the energy to do anything at all.
Something motivates me, and I see no reason why there isn't motivation in these molecules; what they do is already complex enough to be considered as something which may have a special purpose.
We do have consciousness. There is this something in me which sees and tastes, which experiences life. It's hard to believe that this is something material. To me it feels as if complex enough structures of molecules allow something to plug into this universe, to absorb its information and to feed something into it, like instructions which allow this "me" to interact with it.
The same could well be applicable to bacteria or to the most rudimentary lifeforms. Because a bacteria forms part of my body doesn't mean that it can't have its own consciousness; the same may be valid for all this stuff that (maybe) "lives" inside my cells. Lucky me, that I get to stand on its shoulders in order to perceive this universe the way I can and interact with it.
"Works" and "replication" isn't wrong, but removing the "wants" and "likes" from this equation doesn't feel right.
You might want and like things; perhaps (perhaps) cells and bacteria might want and like things, but evolution certainly does not.
So which instantiations/states of the electromagnetic field experience feelings and desires? Are they held in the energy potential or in the energy transfer, or both? Is it enough to have a sufficiently complex feedback loop simulating/predicting itself?
The answer is likely to be both sort of simple but also profound. Eventually we'll have an a-ha moment studying electrocardiographs or FMRI or individual neural networks and be able to replicate experience in other electromagnetic substrates, and knowing precisely what we are, in a sense, will be pretty neat.
Then what will we really know about experience? Is it truly in the electromagnetic field or does it exist in the mathematical relationships that determine the evolution of the fields? That might be a question we never definitely answer from an outside perspective, but is endlessly fascinating to me.
> So which instantiations/states of the electromagnetic field experience feelings and desires?
Personally this is why I think that perhaps qualia is not an emergent phenomenon after all, and must come from outside the system. I.e. I suspect that philosophical zombies are possible
Will we? How can we ever verify that our intervention produces this or that sort of qualia?
(For the record, I'm a fan of theories like IIT [0] that aim to answer questions in the neighborhood of these -- but we should be sober about what is even, in principle, knowable to us. We can verify that intervention X gives behavior Y, but I don't see how we could ever verify that intervention X gives qualitative experience Z (intervening on ourselves aside, which in any case will only tell us about our sort of conscious experience).)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory
Think back 4 billion years to some of the first lifeforms on earth, colonies of slime mould clinging to a rock in the ocean.
The first behaviour of these organisms was to respond to the movement of the sun overhead. They'd orient themselves to regulate their exposure to the sun's rays, arranging themselves in a horizontal plane on top of the rock when the sun was overhead, and vertically along the side of the rock when the sun was at an angle.
The first "desire" was the want of energy. The first behaviour was to move towards the sun.
The first communication was the signal that was passed through the colony of cells to coordinate the movement of the whole community into a mutually beneficial configuration.
The first conflict was when the colony became large enough and so diversely distributed that a part of the community "decided" it would rather not obey the signal to move and instead would move to its own preferred surface of the rock.
As these organisms get more complex and develop more and more differentiated cells, mechanisms also evolve to prohibit cells from “regressing” to undifferentiated forms, and to tightly control aspects of cell growth. Unlike unicellular organisms, a functioning multicellular organism needs to have all its cells coordinate in order to survive. Human cells for instance contain a regulation mechanism which detects abnormal behaviour and directs the cell to commit suicide (a key protein in this mechanism, p53, is widely studied in cancer research).
So no, your cells don’t get their own “will”. They do what they are genetically fated to do. Those that don’t either die, or wind up as a cancer that chokes the life out of their host.
The process is inefficient in that it takes a long time for it to get to a workable solution, but the solutions are usually incredibly efficient.
One way I like to think of evolution is how long it takes to get from one state to another. So it took hundreds of millions of years for the first "life" to evolve-- perhaps close to a billion. This includes RNA, DNA, ATP, etc. Then it took about a billion-ish years to go from prokaryotic to eukaryotic life. Then about another billion-ish years to get multicellular eukaryotic life. Then it only took about a quarter billion years to have dinosaurs. It only took about 10-20 million years to go from the ancestors of all apes to having chimps, gorillas, and people. (!!!) And when you have people directing evolution, like with dogs or crops, you can make things happen very "quickly".