Quantum consciousness...

[The Grand Nudger]

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?

-and again..they seem to be retained because they are not deleterious, and confer the same advantages that non conscious cognizance provide. 

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.

It's not an insult, Matthilda, it's a statement of fact in the context of evolutionary biology.  You thinking "it's fair to say" is more an acceptance of a term of art and arbitrarity than some global hierarchy of development. Coming from me, specifically, a comparison between yourself and a plant should be taken as a compliment. They're the lords of organic chemistry, the foundation of all human life, wildly divergent and beautiful (and sometimes terrible). I respect them greatly, and even in mundane ways my life and my family's happiness depend on them. I don't see them as many (wrongly) see them as lesser species, utterly interchangeable by silk or plastic effigies on coffe tables. After all, who keeps a stuffed dog around in favor of a live one?

That's not how evolution works.

It is, actually.  complex organs like brains or livers or kidneys would be deleterious adaptations for a sessile organism.  It can't move out of the way of incoming teeth.  So, for a sessile organism, solutions to the same problems that plague organisms that -can- move out of the way of teeth have to be arrived upon.  The alternative is death. We don;t expect to find a brain like ours in a plant...but plants do require (and possess) structures that achieve many of the things that our brain achieves.

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.

Plants also "eat food", they use to energy from photosynthesis to metabolize fertility in the soil.  They also respirate, in that they require carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen through their stomata (they can even be suffocated...heat death is an issue of their stomata swelling to the point of not being able to transpirate and bleed excess thermal energy or maintain the vacuum that initiates flow of nutrients and facilitates turgidity - they literally collapse and have trouble breathing when it gets too hot...sound familiar?).  Many can;t breathe underwater, some can..none fly..but many can drift.  Sure, pressure is determined by environmental niches...and we hare our environmental niches with our crop species.  Where we flourish, they flourish; where they flourish, we flourish.  Yes, we';ve found ways to exceed our latitudinal band of cohabitation...but so have they, for their part. So, we could say that we have advantages that they do not, but they also have advantages that we do not. Some advantages, however, we share - and that expresses itself as the fabric of our frequently co-dependent relationships.

What do you mean by 'experience in' and 'experience of' ?

It's a concept in mind/cognition called modality.  The purported difference between ourselves and non conscious species is not, meaningfully, that we have an experience of self.  Not that we have some experience -of- pain..damage, for example.  It's that we can be -in- pain.  That we have an experience in first person, not of it.  VOC signalling plants are self aware by any coherent and consistent description of self awareness...they have an experience -of- the first person, but we don;t extend to them the ability of having an experience -in- the first person.

Any reason to suggest this?

Sure, I've already mentioned a couple, and you won't find a shortage if you kept looking..and you yourself offered examples earlier in thread - when speaking about how your NN could learn.  

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.

I can think of plenty of advantages, I just can't think of any that would be impossible to achieve in some other modality of cognizance.  I suggested one, shared experience of suffering, of being -in- pain together builds bonds that facilitate strongly beneficial reproductive outcomes.  OFC, a non conscious this or that with an unchangeable subroutine for reproductive and kinship fidelity would be capable of the same thing, perhaps even moreso..in that we, despite being purportedly conscious and building bonds seemingly based on those shared conscious experiences are still capable of infidelity.

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On that last one, and as an example of something I touched on earlier...while we're very capable of abandoning our progeny and family...sea rocket is not.  Not only can this plant recognize it;s kin, they band together in colonies to exterminate other, non kin colonies of the same species and any other competing organism - they're self aware, and aware of others, and of the relationships between themselves and others, and capable of coordinating attacks on others without harming their kingroup - despite being non- conscious so far as we can tell.  They use their roots to both chemically poison the earth and also to mechanically strangle, starve, and dehydrate, and uproot kinship out-groups.  

They're more reliable brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers than we are, on that count.