Quantum consciousness...

[I_am_not_mafia]

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.  

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?

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.

Do you find yourself insulting people at random by telling them that they are no more highly developed than a plant?

OK, well maybe it's time to define what we both mean by highly developed. I take it it to mean that we are more complex, can do more, are better able to sense and act within an environment. All forms of life on Earth can find a common ancestor. Some evolutionary niches will allow more complexity to evolve over time than others. Crocodiles and alligators have not needed to develop much at all over the last 65 million years. Peacocks are stuck on a local maxima in their evolutionary landscape (evolutionary dead-end). So yes I think it is fair to say that some forms of life are more highly developed than others, as well as being disparately developed.

After all, Neuroscientists commonly refer to parts of the brain in terms of evolutionary age, the reptilian brain, the limbic system, the neocortex etc.

 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.

That's not how evolution works.

 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.  

Only the same pressures in the most general sense in that organisms need to survive and procreate. I don't know how you can seriously argue that we share the same pressures for achieving similar abilities as all other organisms. I don't know about you, but I eat food and don't need to photosynthesise, or to breathe under water, or fly. The pressure is determined by the environmental niche of the species.

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.

What do you mean by 'experience in' and 'experience 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.

Any reason to suggest this?

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.

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.