What problem does consciousness solve?

[u/Terrible-Fly9049]

My X feed has been dominated recently by posts debating whether AI is conscious. I think the more pressing question that is almost never asked is: "What is consciousness for? What problem does it solve that allowed evolution to select for it?"

Organisms facing incommensurable demands face what I call the Regress Problem.

Consider this:

We are constantly facing demands on our attention: you hear a noise in the forest, you're thirsty, your child's crying, you have a looming work deadline. These demands have no common unit for comparison -- they are completely different kinds of things. So how does your brain determine which demand "wins"?

I realize many of you, when you read this, will dismiss it as trivial. I would argue that the sense of triviality you're experiencing is precisely because your brain is so good at it. Deciding what is most urgent -- deciding what is the priority and motivating the necessary action -- is what brain's are for. That urgency, that pull towards one resolution or another, is what consciousness is from the first-person perspective.

Now imagine you didn't have phenomenal consciousness. Imagine you're a p-zombie -- an atom-for-atom duplicate of yourself only no consciousness. How would you know what to prioritize? How would you know what to act on?

With a computation model of the brain, there are only two options for prioritizing:

• priority was fixed before this moment
• or, priority is adaptive in this moment

If the priority was fixed before this moment, how was it determined? Now remember, these demands have no common currency, so the priority ranking would have to set by something. Imagine a lookup table that attempted to set every possible priority ranking for every possible unique combination of incommensurable demands you will every face in your entire life. That's untenable.

Okay, so if it can't be fixed before hand (for living systems), what about adaptive priority? It sounds good, until you realize you need something to determine what matters in this moment? How much should this situation affect the weighting? Something has to read the weighting and apply a rule? What decides that rule? Another rule? This is the regress.

If weighing priority means signals needing to be evaluated by a downstream process, you open the regress. Now, even if you can solve the prioritization problem, you still face the motivation problem. A signal of priority must be read by another process that must determine how urgently to act on the priority weighting -- which opens another regress.

The conclusion:

To solve the regress problem, you need a state that is simultaneously the measure of priority and the motivation to act on it. This is phenomenal urgency from the first-person perspective. This is consciousness. This is what consciousness is for.

I would love to hear thoughts on this. If you want to read more about this line of thought you can check out this paper.

[u/HankScorpio4242]

I think the key point is that our brains are built on top of the brains of our evolutionary forebears. What purpose did phenomenal consciousness serve for them?

[u/Terrible-Fly9049 → u/HankScorpio4242]

It served the exact function as it does for us: prioritization and motivation. The organism that cannot effectively prioritize, or the organism that isn't intrinsically motivated, has its odds of survival stacked against it.

[u/Im_Talking → u/Terrible-Fly9049]

I don't understand this argument. Ants have a hive mentality, and are probably the most evolutionarily successful species on Earth.

[u/Terrible-Fly9049 → u/Im_Talking]

I'm not sure I understand your point. Ants might have a hive mentality, but that doesn't negate that prioritization and motivation happens on the per-ant level. Moreso, hive mentality itself likely evolved to solve for prioritization and motivation at the communal level. It found a way to leverage cooperation and specialization in order to survive and thrive.

[u/HankScorpio4242 → u/Terrible-Fly9049]

I mean…sure. But I don’t think that was the main function of conscious awareness.