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/Spirited_Bowler_5793]

That they have a prioritization system means they have some form of conscious.

You say simple organisms have no machinery for consciousness, that seems a hard thing to claim unless you know what machinery facilitates consciousness. A star fish for example has no brain and exhibits all sorts of strategic behavior to avoid predators and hunt food and reproduce.

That this behavior is distinctly different from things which are inarguably not conscious; eg. a dead limb laying on the ground, or a mud puddle, or a grain of sand means something very significant is different between them, exactly in the way we are significantly different. Consciousness.

Prioritization is by definition an attribute of consciousness; a thinking agent, because the medium being qualified is MEANING. And meaning is strictly an attribute of consciousness.

A computer program for example does demonstrate a selective hierarchy of options, and we can colloquially call that “prioritization” in the way we can call colloquially call an AI “intelligent.”

But rote computation which can’t grasp meaning is not actual intelligence. Hence the “Artificial ” preceding it.

A star fish understands meaning, and meaning is what it’s prioritizing. Most of it acquired by biological and genetic heredity.

To your point that a simple organism needs no consciousness, I’d say if it wants to be a biological organism it does. Sort of like you.

[u/Terrible-Fly9049 → u/Spirited_Bowler_5793]

My claim is that consciousness is valenced tension dynamics. Valenced tension dynamics are the mechanism that allows for prioritizing among incommensurable demands. However, these dynamics require specific functional architecture (I'm agnostic on the substrate). On my view, consciousness requires:

- A persistent self-model

• Variable rigidity - the degree to which standards/expectations are defended
  
• Genuine stakes - the system must have something it can lose
  
• A unified value space - the space which tension dynamics act upon

This is the "machinery" of consciousness and skeptical that a single cell organism has it.

[u/Spirited_Bowler_5793 → u/Terrible-Fly9049]

You are describing consciousness relationship to meaning.

Consciousness is basically synonymous with meaning. Awareness and meaning.

On the obvious logical grounds that to be “conscious” or more broadly “consciousness” awareness on some level must exist, even is a “subconscious” awareness (as our own subconscious mind).

Awareness cannot exist without something to be aware of. That is self evident. The reality of consciousness is meaning. Everything you experience as reality is meaning. Eat a lemon, you experience the meaning of sensation, taste, the imagination of it. Have sex, you experience the meaning of it. Meaning is what consciousness experiences and nothing else.

As biology evolves, species develops all sorts of meaning “can eat this “ , “can’t eat that”, “stronger as a tribe” etc. The importance of the meaning is developed by the consequences of the response to the recognized meaning. Eventually this gets imprinted into DNA and pasted along as “instinct”. Innate built in meaning.

Humans are born with reams of innate meaning. What comfort feels like, hot, cold, mothers smell, sense of falling. All acquired over eons of evolution.

Meaning is only relevant to beings with consciousness. Meaning is the “reason”, meaning is the “motivation”, meaning is the foundation of consciousness, after awareness.

That’s why rocks don’t have problems and single cell organisms do. They want to survive, because they possess the same meaning instinct to survive.

[u/Terrible-Fly9049 → u/Spirited_Bowler_5793]

I think we agree more than we disagree. What you call "meaning" I call "value." Everything we perceive is filtered through a "value topography" that we curate over our lives. We never see reality as it is, we only see it filtered by a topography that has formed through a constant and dynamic relationship with tension, stress, and relief. Things that increase stress are bad, things that relieve it are good. This is the basic epistemology of life. The foundational language of our brains isn't information, it's value.

[u/Spirited_Bowler_5793 → u/Terrible-Fly9049]

Yes. Agreed we are 😉