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Comment by suby | Hacker News Reader

I think it's likely that consciousness only occurs in a population which undergoes evolution / natural selection. I think it offers a competitive advantage over other let's say processes which you're competing for resources with. It's unlikely for something like the sun to be conscious, there's no evolutionary pressure exerted on it.

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Evolutionary pressure itself doesn't generate new features, it merely selects them for propagation (in a self-propagating system). In biological organisms, the thing that generates new features are viruses (injections of genetic code into other genetic code) and the natural errors involved of replicating genetic code.

That answers the question of how pretty much every biological feature is produced and propagated, except the question of how/when/where something goes from being unconscious to conscious.

Evolutionary pressure has chosen fireflies that can not only track fast-moving prey, but actually predict their trajectory. Does prediction require some level of consciousness? How about for bigger animals?

Consciousness is a spectrum. Even humans, the pinnacle of known consciousness, can go from conscious to unconscious and back fairly easy. What's the exact instant when the sky turns from red to blue in a sunrise?

I’m not debating any of this.

The question is what happens between zygote formation and an adult human. Either the zygote “has consciousness” in it already, or consciousness appears at some point in development. So the question is: when?

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