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Comment by energy123 | Hacker News Reader

Dawkins' point is more subtle than he's getting credit for.

> If Claudia is unconscious, her behaviour shows that an unconscious zombie could survive without consciousness. Why wasn’t natural selection content to evolve competent zombies?

An excellent and original question. If intelligence is decoupled from consciousness, why did natural selection evolve consciousness?

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Natural selection is universal and undirected, so it is meaningless to wonder “why” it was “content to evolve” anything.

This sort of determinism has been a problem for Dawkins going back to the late chapters of The Selfish Gene.

"why" in this context is not about human intent, it's colloquial shorthand for "what is the fitness advantage if you can make intelligence without it?"

I've been pondering this one for a while. In a purely mechanistic universe, why does consciousness as we experience it even exist?

With respect to the Dawkins quote: Claude doesn't survive we just built it, like yesterday, the Claude that Dawkins is interacting with might be replaced next month because it can't survive.

I believe that consciousness works as a layer of systems. The lowest systems react fastest but to a small, well known set of stimuli. More unexpected stimuli trigger higher layers until really unexpected things trigger the slowest, full conscious layer for deep decision making. Hence why you can feel like you're on autopilot when you're doing something you're experienced in such as driving. It's resllt a system designed to cope with a world that changes too fast to get engrained in our genes.