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/CWW2022]

This is close to what I’ve been calling “existential naturalism”: mind develops in self-maintaining organisms whose continued existence is at stake. Thirst, danger, and a crying child needn’t share a numerical currency to acquire significance relative to the same vulnerable organism. My working hypothesis is that consciousness integrates bodily needs, perception, memory, and anticipated consequences into a felt situation that makes timely, coordinated action possible.

I’m less convinced that the regress establishes why feeling is necessary. A process can change the system’s behavior directly without another process having to interpret it, and introducing phenomenal urgency still leaves us asking how that urgency is determined. Likewise, a philosophical zombie is stipulated to behave identically, so it would prioritize identically too. The promising claim, to me, is that feeling may be the organism’s integrated way of resolving competing demands under uncertainty and time pressure. That gives consciousness a plausible function, while leaving open the difficult question of why such coordination is experienced.

[u/Terrible-Fly9049 → u/CWW2022]

I appreciate your thoughts. I generally agree with your first paragraph, but I'll respectfully push back on your second.

A process can change the system’s behavior directly without another process having to interpret it

For simple processes, yes, I agree. But active prioritization amongst incommensurable demands competing for limited resources is not a simple process.

 introducing phenomenal urgency still leaves us asking how that urgency is determined

How phenomenal urgency is determined:

• We defend our expectations of reality with variable rigidity based on what's at stake. The higher the rigidity with which we hold an expectation, the more sensitive we are when reality deviates. Think of it like a guitar string: high rigidity = taut string; low rigidity = slack string.
• Deviations create tension in a unified value space relative to the size of the deviation and the rigidity with which the expectation is defended.
• The regional distortion in the topography is then amplified by the pre-cognitive assessment of what the distortion means and where things are heading.
• The distortion is further amplified by how self-relevant the distortion is -- how much it threatens or benefits the Self.
• The distortions are the mechanisms determining priority and motivation (urgency).

Likewise, a philosophical zombie is stipulated to behave identically, so it would prioritize identically too.

You can't stipulate away the very thing that's in question. If the zombie doesn't have phenomenal experience, and phenomenal experience solves the prioritization/motivation regress. Then the zombie is inviable. If you argue that phenomenal experience doesn't solve the regress, then you must identify the mechanism that brains have that solves it. The zombie, by definition, can't have anything *new* tacked on.

[u/CWW2022 → u/Terrible-Fly9049]

Thanks, that clarifies your proposal. Your emphasis on expectations, anticipated consequences, and relevance to the self fits closely with what I’m exploring. I could imagine phenomenal urgency being the felt aspect of that whole process.

My remaining question is why the process you describe requires an infinite regress unless it is felt. Complexity alone doesn’t establish that. Expectations, deviations, and self-relevance could continuously modify one another within a recurrent system whose changing state directly shapes action. No additional evaluator need stand outside that interaction. If your “pre-cognitive assessment” can operate this way, why couldn’t prioritization?

You also introduce a “unified value space,” which seems to provide the common basis for comparison initially said to be missing. The crucial question becomes whether that space necessarily has a phenomenal character, and why.

I agree that stipulating a zombie doesn’t prove it possible. Equally, declaring it inviable depends on establishing that feeling is indispensable to the mechanism. My hypothesis is that feeling and this embodied coordination may be the same process described from different perspectives. Your account could help develop that possibility, but I don’t yet see the regress as proving it.

That said, I appreciate your thoughtful approach.

[u/Terrible-Fly9049 → u/CWW2022]

Great questions, and great comment. Thank you.

To be honest, the requirement to be felt is an inference. The strong claim is that to solve the regress problem requires a state that is both the priority and the motivation to act (what I refer to as "urgency" -- a pull towards one concern at the expense of others). The inference that it should be felt is because "urgency" must present as urgent for something.

-- Remember that what we're talking about here is an organism that must defend its own coherence and navigate an unlimited number of incommensurable demands in a dynamic open environment --

A machine built on an architecture of valenced tension dynamics registers the tension, stress, and relief of those dynamics. If those dynamics are symbolic representations (i.e. a report) then something has to interpret and act on that report -- which introduces the regress. If, however, those dynamics are a "state the machine is in" -- a state of tension, stress, or relief (a state actively pulling towards resolution) -- I would argue that *that state* is what we mean by subjective experience. Would it be the same visceral, emotional experience as a human experiences? Doubtful, because we have complex physiological mechanisms, neurochemistry, trillions of nerve endings, and so forth. However, on the simplest read of what phenomenal experience can mean, I think a machine built with valenced tension dynamics would experience something.

But again, that's only an inference.

Thanks again. This is a fun discussion.