(June 12, 2016 at 5:15 pm)Gemini Wrote:(June 12, 2016 at 5:09 pm)Emjay Wrote: I'm still hung up on why there is experience in the first place... as a hard determinist AFAIK it's superfluous and we may as well be philosophical zombies so the question for me is why are we not? I don't think we'd do anything whatsoever differently without phenomenal consciousness... civilization would still progress as it is now and people would still use Facebook etc but there would be no conscious recognition of any of it, just neural networks processing data.
That's a good question. It would seem the answer is the evolutionary pathway to a computational architecture that functioned in terms of experiences with pleasurable and unpleasurable values was simpler than a purely formal computational architecture.
Why this should be the case is probably one of the most important questions in neuroscience. I haven't a clue, to be honest.
I can (roughly) understand that from a neural network perspective but it still doesn't say anything about why or how there is phenomenal experience. If you're interested, me, Bennyboy, Rhythm, and ChadWooters discussed this at length in the thread Philosophy>Seeing Red. That thread was a lot of fun and yielded a lot of insight (I thought) and we've all got theories but in the end they're just theoriesÂ
