(August 25, 2017 at 11:43 am)Mathilda Wrote: 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?
If by consciousness, you mean an organism's ability to interact with its environment, I'd argue that a QM particle very obviously has that: its resolved state is dependent on what happens outside itself, and QM experiments go to pretty elaborate lengths, actually, to attempt to confound it.
If by consciousness, you mean the capacity to experience qualia, we are completely agnostic on that with regard to evolution. In order to demonstrate that something is an evolved trait, you have first to be able to demonstrate that it is a real property of organisms. However, there are no fossils of qualia. To talk about the evolution of consciousness, we'd have to develop a completely unprovable narrative, and I don't see how we could avoid begging the question in a particularly horrible way.
Even the word "advantage" is pretty dangerous, as it implies a goal and a path to achieve it. To say that evolution has goals is to say that a pair of dice dreams of coming up double-6.
