The Philosophy of Mind: Zombies, "radical emergence" and evidence of non-experiential

[Edwardo Piet]

 While consciousness may possess no computational utility (I doubt this as well..but I'm running with it to avoid truly useless disagreement), evolutionary utility is a whole different bag of worms, don't you think?  Can you look at the civilization around you, all of it, all of human civilization...this monolithic edifice to human consciousness (however imperfectly described or known), and convince yourself that it conferred no reproductive advantages whatsoever?

No I couldn't but I never said otherwise and that doesn't interact with any of my points or analogies. The point is that consciousness as qualia, doesn't appear to have any evolutionary utility, I'm not denying that obviously many other things have evolutionary utility. The point is precisely that the things that do have evolutionary utility appear to have all that utility without qualia and qualia doesn't appear to have any evolutionary utility at all... despite it being the most real thing in the universe.

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You don't think that the investigations of science leverage our conscious experience, or that the production of art and culture in our population is derived from that exeperience?  You see no particular physical attraction in a conscious agent that is otherwise not present in a doll?

They aren't derived from our experience, they're examples of our experience. If objective reality exists outside our experience we by definition can't experience it.

Obviously our brains could do all that art without any qualia at all. That is my entire point.

These would be things that consciousness is doing, or if you prefer contributing to in the context of evolutionary biology.

No, no qualia required for any of that. I've already illustrated that with the Strawson quote.

 Are they computationally useful?  Maybe not.  Does it grant you "free will"..neither of us thinks so.  Are they selectively advantageous?  Take a look around you, you tell me.

That's all irrelevant. The point is that qualia doesn't appear to be performing any function. The brain could want to be an artist without there being any conscious experience involved. In the same way that a non-conscious robot could be programmed by humans to create art.... humans could have been programmed by evolution to happen to go in that direction (no intention involved in nature itself of course) via natural selection.... without the qualia. Take our qualia away and we get no experience of art, but we get us engagining in art without experiencing it. We get unconscious desires and plans instead of conscious ones. You're just making my point for me there.

Take consciousness away and nothing seems to change besides our not talking about it and our not experiencing it. Everything else seems to be the same (just without the seeming ).