Quantum consciousness...

[The Grand Nudger]

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.

If something doesn't kill us and confers advantages it's likely to persist and spread.  It's not really that things come about for a reason - that would be teleology.  They persist for a reason, or do not persist for a reason - that's evolution.

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.

The evolution of complex organs in plants would be deleterious, not advantageous.  Plants have -had- sufficient time..they've had much more time than ourselves.  They've gone through many more generations and iterations than ourselves.  By and large their lifespans are shorter, their reproductive cycles are sudden, and their progeny almost unfathomably numerous.  They aren't suffering from a shortage of time or opportunity for evolution - organs like ours simply aren't suited to an organism like them.  They do, still, have to deal with all the problems we deal with - and so they have adaptations to that effect better suited for their own biological constraints.  Effective analogs, not structural analogs (amusingly, this is also the contention of the computer analogy).

Some of them provide abilities that fit the basic metrics of cognizance.  They use these adaptations to cognizance to deal with the same problems that we use our brains to deal with.  We posit that our consciousness confers advantages x,y,z...but a plant uses those other things, it's non-conscious analogs, to secure the same x, y, and z's. This is what I've been referring to when I propose that the advantages of what we take to be consciousness are not overwhelmingly or uniformly different from the advantage of things we take to be non conscious, that the reason for the persistence of consciousness as cognizance and "other x" as cognizance are widely the same. No specific and absolute advantage is presented by one, over the other. Just two ways to skin the same cat.

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.

Is it a useful concept, sure, in that in gives specificity.  Does it accurately describe a difference that actually exists between ourselves and some other x?  I don't know, but I doubt it.  Some reductive theories of mind posit that our "in" is just a narrative "of".  In positing that consciousness aids cognition, as you do below, you are implicitly making an equivalent division between of and in - and this is the subtle division that the concept of modality is meant to address.

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.

Sea rocket isn't alone in that - it's only alone in it's merciless kin selection.  -All- plants have absurdly well developed sensory apparatus, a rich sensual life, all plants benefit from a way of handling and using the information that their sensory apparatus creates - but none have brains and perhaps none have consciousness of any sort.  There's really nothing rudimentary about them, at all.   

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).

An unrooted parasitic germinate, with no central nervous system and nary a single complex organ, that's..on average, 5cm long...is both mobile and capable of performing action selection.  The question becomes, does consciousness actually help it, or would it, in any way, or is consciousness an elaborate story we tell ourselves about how parasitic vines pick solanum out of a crowd and inch their way towards it - is our "consciousness" qualitatively or quantitatively different?  As we were musing over earlier, experience of or experience in.  

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?

My answer to your question isn't that consciousness should be provided at any specific level, simply that it isn't at some, and we have some indications as to why.  Similarly, there's no reason that it should be provided at the level of neurons (or whatever the fuck plants are doing at any given moment)....but, in both cases, it either is or possibly is or something like what we call consciousness is present in both (huge caveat for misapprehensions we have about it). What I wonder, is what it is that both plants, and brains are doing. Are they achieving the same end in a meaningfully different way, or are they achieving the same end in the same way with meaningfully different architectures. What is the shared unit or method of cognizance, if there is one...and if there isn't...just how many ways -are- there to skin that cat?

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I wonder if it is possible for a plant to come up with a novel solution to a new problem without a couple of generations of selection to enable the genome of the species to refine a response?  It seems as though we do that.  We solve problems individually and collaboratively in ways which do not depend on natural selection.  In a sense, it is the species of plants which have shown great adaptability, but every individual plant is, as one of you put it, a stimulus/response implementer.

Consciousness might not require this ability to adapt on an individual basis but it does seem to be an advantage, especially for organisms which are conscious of their own mortality and prefer to postpone it.  Then again, from the standpoint of tradition amongst the life forms of the planet, we might seem to be an aberration: a species in which its representatives serve their own aims rather than that of the genome.  Of course genomes are probably not self aware so there is probably very little resentment or outrage about us.

Do we come up with novel ways to solve new problems, or do we employ tested strategies for familiar old problems that may apply to the conceptually "new" problem?  Laying that aside, I think that we're capable of abstraction, I doubt that plants have this ability (whereas our mechanism of cognition is at least conceptually capable of doing so by reference to it's architecture, theirs is not by reference to the same).  In that sense, we're manipulating the same old abstractions to new ends...so..despite it being an issue of not using anything novel - novel effects and outcomes are possible. It definitely seems to be advantageous, in some circumstance....enough to make a difference, I'd wager. Though, plants would likely overcome whatever problem that was through adaptive, rather than cognitive, means. They have so far, at least.