Quantum consciousness...

[The Grand Nudger]

Implicit in your objection to it then is the assumption that consciousness is a by-product, emergent phenomenon or an accident.

Only insomuch as all abilities and structures are, in the evolutionary context; byproducts, emergent, or accidental.  The sum total of whats left.  Reproduction with variation, time, and death.  

Why assume this for consciousness and not for any other feature of the brain? We can point to the functionality provided by emotions, cognition, memory, action selection, sensory processing etc, why not also consciousness? Or are you arguing that it is a special case? If so, why?

See above.

Are you denying that we evolved consciousness? The more highly developed species generally show more signs of consciousness.

We're already diving into mistakes, see.  You are not more highly developed than a plant.  You;re disparately developed. If you consider how each rep is embodied (a subject I know you enjoy) the differences in how they achieve the same advantage may be illuminated. Plants, for example..cant run...and so, organs are costly. A plant with a brain like ours is making one hell of a biological gamble. Still, they find themselves subject to the same pressures, and so some means of achieving similar abilities is beneficial to them for the same reasons that it's beneficial to us.

Consciousness did not evolve by accident. We have it for the advantage that it provides us, otherwise evolution would not have selected for it. So the question is, what is that advantage? What functionality does it provide?

-and my answer was that experience in probably evolved for the same reason that experience of did.  They both confer, widely, the same advantages - though by no means all of the same advantages..though even here, I wouldn;t call parity between the two impossible, just not presently existent so far as we can tell. I ca';t tell you that there's -anything- that experience in can do that experience of couldn't, I can only tell you what individual reps appear to be using one or the other for.

You have already suggested some, for example creating social and sexual bonds. Although your example does raise the question of whether an organism can experience pain if it is not conscious. Does a non-conscious organism such as a sea slug or plant exposed to aversive stimuli experience pain or is pain only the conscious experience of aversive stimuli?

Of/in.  If a sea slug experience pain in the manner that I'm referring to, it would be in, not of.  

No it's more like asking what are the advantages of being able to fly and walk rather than just walk.

-and there the implicit assumption becomes explicit.  Consiousness ios flight, whereas non-conciousness is walking.  Again, I;m suggesting that they may both be forms of flight.

Specifically, what are the advantage of being able to sense the environment and how you react to it rather than being a stimulus response agent?

-and my answer to that question was that I don't think that there is a specific or uniform advantage of one over the the other - that they are both ways of securing largely the same advantages, just as different means of flight are all ways of securing largely the same advantages.