Quantum consciousness...

[I_am_not_mafia]

But those abilities and structures, whether you call them byproducts, emergent or accidental, are all retained because they confer an evolutionary advantage. So what evolutionary advantage is conferred by consciousness?

-and again..they seem to be retained because they are not deleterious, and confer the same advantages that non conscious cognizance provide. 

Not just retained. That just means that there is no cost to them. Only beneficial mutations that increase fitness propagate throughout the population .Retained features do not, but they do widen the search space and allow the possibility of further beneficial mutations to occur. And if they do then the neutral feature and the beneficial mutation both get propagated.

But this is referring to duplication and mutation of the genotype. This is much lower level than a fully developed and complex feature feature such as consciousness. You cannot argue that such a thing happened by accident and was merely  retained because there was no cost to it. It involves too much of the brain. So we can assume that consciousness came about for a reason.

That's not how evolution works.

It is, actually.  complex organs like brains or livers or kidneys would be deleterious adaptations for a sessile organism.  It can't move out of the way of incoming teeth.  So, for a sessile organism, solutions to the same problems that plague organisms that -can- move out of the way of teeth have to be arrived upon.  The alternative is death.  We don;t expect to find a brain like ours in a plant...but plants do require (and possess) structures that achieve many of the things that our brain achieves.  

It isn't actually how evolution works. A plant has no ability to grow a brain, liver or kidney even by accident. There is just no physical mechanism in place where those plant genes could be expressed as a such a complex organ. It inhabits the completely wrong part of evolutionary space for that. That's not to say that a plant could not evolve them given sufficient time if the environmental pressures were there.

Unless you have completely redefined what is meant by a brain, liver and kidney that is.

What do you mean by 'experience in' and 'experience of' ?

It's a concept in mind/cognition called modality.  The purported difference between ourselves and non conscious species is not, meaningfully, that we have an experience of self.  Not that we have some experience -of- pain..damage, for example.  It's that we can be -in- pain.  That we have an experience in first person, not of it.  VOC signalling plants are self aware by any coherent and consistent description of self awareness...they have an experience -of- the first person, but we don;t extend to them the ability of having an experience -in- the first person.

Is this a useful concept? Is there any evidence that we need to differentiate between 'experience in' and 'experience of' ? Is there an objective way of determining whether an organism is 'in the sensation' rather than having an 'experience of it'? Can a human with brain damage or a neurodegenerative disease have experience of pain when they would normally have experience being in it? If not then it sounds like a pointless philosophical concept to me.

Or is it that there are no or few advantages that you can personally think of? It is a hard question but coming at it from the perspective of building an embodied artificial intelligence, I could start to see reasons why we would want to deliberately build in functionality that could be construed as consciousness.

I can think of plenty of advantages, I just can't think of any that would be impossible to achieve in some other modality of cognizance.  I suggested one, shared experience of suffering, of being -in- pain together builds bonds that facilitate strongly beneficial reproductive outcomes.  OFC, a non conscious this or that with an unchangeable subroutine for reproductive and kinship fidelity would be capable of the same thing, perhaps even moreso..in that we, despite being purportedly conscious and building bonds seemingly based on those shared conscious experiences are still capable of infidelity.

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On that last one, and as an example of something I touched on earlier...while we're very capable of abandoning our progeny and family...sea rocket is not.  Not only can this plant recognize it;s kin, they band together in colonies to exterminate other, non kin colonies of the same species and any other competing organism - they're self aware, and aware of others, and of the relationships between themselves and others, and capable of coordinating attacks on others without harming their kingroup - despite being non- conscious so far as we can tell.  They use their roots to both chemically poison the earth and also to mechanically strangle, starve, and dehydrate, and uproot kinship out-groups.  

I'd argue then that sea rocket is developing the first rudimentary levels of consciousness. Any organism that needs a sense of self and a sense of others, whether it is because it is predator, prey or part of a pack or colony that has to co-ordinate its actions, will benefit from consciousness.

I'd also argue that consciousness helps any intelligent agent that performs action selection. Emotion is known to narrow our range of likely responses to a particular stimuli, whereas cognition widens it. Consciousness aids cognition. For example recognising that you are in a particular emotional state (e.g. dying of thirst) and the danger of the most likely response (e.g. drinking seawater).

So getting back to the original point I was making:

2) Why should this functionality be provided at the quantum level rather than at the level of a network of neurons?