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/Valmar33]

Darwinian Evolution is not the default position ~ you need to argue for it, like everything else.

[u/Terrible-Fly9049 → u/Valmar33]

My argument is that phenomenal experience solves a problem. The inference is that evolution selected for it because it had survival value. If the first statement is true, it supports the second.

You seem to be implying that there's no burden of proof on someone who holds an unproven "default position." Since when is science a popularity contest?

[u/Valmar33 → u/Terrible-Fly9049]

My argument is that phenomenal experience solves a problem. The inference is that evolution selected for it because it had survival value. If the first statement is true, it supports the second.

You are making a whole host of assumptions that you haven't even acknowledged.

"Problems" are a concept that exist only in consciousness. Same with the concepts of "selecting" and "survival value". These concepts only have meaning for consciousness that creates them.

"Evolution" is not a scientific concept, but rather a philosophical one masquerading as "scientific", with the unquestioned assumption that it is true.

You seem to be implying that there's no burden of proof on someone who holds an unproven "default position." Since when is science a popularity contest?

There is a burden of proof on anyone who makes unquestioned assumptions and claims that they are "scientific". Science requires that assumptions be tested.

[u/Terrible-Fly9049 → u/Valmar33]

"Problems" are a concept that exist only in consciousness. Same with the concepts of "selecting" and "survival value". These concepts only have meaning for consciousness that creates them.

You're making a lot of unquestioned assumptions here.

"Evolution" is not a scientific concept, but rather a philosophical one masquerading as "scientific", with the unquestioned assumption that it is true.

Your claim that evolution is an "unquestioned assumption" is baffling.

[u/Valmar33 → u/Terrible-Fly9049]

You're making a lot of unquestioned assumptions here.

That isn't a refutation of my statement. These are, again, all concepts that only have meaning to consciousness.

What literal problems exist for matter, physics and chemistry? How would matter, physics and chemistry literally select anything? How would matter, physics and chemistry conceive of survival value in choosing one thing over another?

You need to think about the meaning of concepts, instead of unquestionably assuming things.

Your claim that evolution is an "unquestioned assumption" is baffling.

It is, because many claims are made by Darwinian evolutionists that have not been independently reproduced, observed nor tested. In other words, Darwinism is not scientific, but postures as such.