Quantum consciousness...

[The Grand Nudger]

in terms of its functionality. I can almost feel Khemikal reaching for this keyboard right now 

teehee 

Only because a definition from functionality doesn't require consciousness as opposed to cognizance.  No functional benefit of consciousness seems unique to consciousness, and we can find all of the proposed functional benefits of consciousness present in cognizance - even in minimal cognizance...and most of them even in the absence of cognizance  

It's like asking why freckles evolved as distinct from what advantage melanin confers.  There's no reason that freckles evolved, they serve no functional purpose, no specific advantage....they aren't even meaningfully distinct from "melanin production/distribution/concentration in the skin"....and yet they're widely present in our breeding population.  Their existence as a heritable trait has plenty to do with sexual selection - but that;s well after the fact.  Freckles, specifically, didn;t emerge as an adaptive solution, melanin did as UV protection..it's only that the mechanism of -that- expresses itself in a particular way, with consequence and ancillary effect, that freckles exist.

Do you think it's possible that, as some hard reductivist theories/hypothesis of mind posit - the same may be true of consciousness? That there is no meaningful distinction between of/in..and so, the question, what benefit does consciousness, itself, provide...becomes a nonsensical question?

( I also describe/explain "consciousness" in terms of it's functionality, btw, but I explicitly own valid criticisms of that manner of response. I do think that some people take those valid criticisms and spin them into non-seqs, though.)

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I never said that things come about for a reason.

Asking why something evolved, for what reason, is asking precisely that.  Perhaps unintentionally, as an artifact of poor phrasing. Ergo the reason for piping up.

Ah right so now you've changed what you're talking about and referring to the evolution of complex organs in plants. That's not what I was arguing against. To remind you, you said this:

By referring to it as a biological gamble you made it sound like you were referring to the possibility of a plant growing a whole brain when previous plants were unable to. If this is what you mean then you are wrong because as I pointed out, a plant cannot suddenly grow a brain regardless of whether it is deleterious or not. If this is not what you meant then you were wrong to refer to it as a biological gamble, because to evolve to the point where it would be capable of growing a brain there would have to have been an evolutionary pressure to develop the mechanisms by which it would be able to grow a brain, in which case it wouldn't be that much of a gamble.

A simple misunderstanding, then.  I don't see any barrier of possibility, I see biological constraints which prevent that possibility being actualized.  There -is- evolutionary pressure to "develop a brain" - all of the same evolutionary pressure we face.  There are strong negative evolutionary pressures to plants when it comes to -any- complex organ.  They simply cannot flee predation, so however they achieve any effect x takes that negative selective pressure into account.  If you have a brain, you can't afford having a bite taken out of it.  Plants are nibbled on with regularity.  They achieve many of the same effects we achieve with complex organs like brains by leveraging "simpler" more (and more quickly) replicable structures.  I use simple as a term of art and concordance between us - those structures and strategies are absurdly well developed and wildly successful.

Take what I said earlier about emotion narrowing the range of actions likely to occur and cognition widening the range. This happens over the course of an agent's lifetime. Yet you can also make the same argument comparing cognition and instinct. Instinct is learnt over evolutionary time, cognition allows a single agent to learn faster. Cognition provides benefits for the agent in exploiting their immediate environment whereas evolutionary strategies only benefit the offspring in exploiting their environmental niche.

You can also make the same comparison with general intelligence and evolution. An intelligent species of predator or prey hunt / escape more often and more effectively than if the species improved over time through evolution. This is because evolution is a very slow process. Intelligence is many orders of magnitude faster. Seen in terms of self organisation, there is a thermodynamic pressure on both the development of intelligence and evolution to maximise entropy, and intelligence does this faster, more effectively and efficiently.

So you argue that any advantages that consciousness can bring an agent can also be achieved via other means, and I don't necessarily deny that. But I would argue that consciousness brings about those advantages faster. In terms of self organisation, intelligence and consciousness allow the thermodynamic gradient to be minimised to a greater degree than can be achieved through the evolutionary process alone.

How and why does consciousness bring about those advantages, whatever they are, faster?  When considering the advantages of consciousness over cognizance we are not considering "evolutionary advantages" - heritable advantages.  We're considering two allegedly disparate systems that are both capable of exceeding, in a sense, their evolutionary inheritance.  

(It might also be useful to point out that your comments on intelligence as it relates to self organization and entropy here and before are, themselves, a form of natural teleology. Not telling you that you're wrong - I wouldn't know.)

Specificity of what? Show me how it is a useful concept.

One can't speak of the advantages of consciousness over cognizance without explicit or implicit reference to it.  I don't think it's accurate, personally.  

Why assume that the ability to process needs to be centralised in a brain? Two thirds of the neurons of an octopus are found in its tentacles. Only one third is found in its brain. I personally grow carnivorous plants so I am well aware of how some plants can sense and move very fast, yet also avoid being fooled by extraneous sensory stimuli.

I don't.  I don't think it needs to be centralized, I don't even think it requires a living organism.  ....?

If the unrooted parasitic vine was more effectively able to act in co-ordination with fellow vines, or the Solanum was actively trying to avoid it by deploying a trap that relied on the vine's most likely response, then yes, I could see an advantage in the vine evolving consciousness. But the interaction is not that complex so there is no pressure for consciousness to evolve. Using plants as an example is a false equivalence.

They actively avoid them by releasing those VOC signals to call predators.  What advantage could you see, and how is consciousness disparate from cognizance (which, by definition, both the vine and the voc callers already possess)?  That;s the question that people criticizing statements like these are asking you.  

That wasn't really what I meant by my question so I shall rephrase it. I can see now how it was ambiguous. Either way we are probably in agreement that systems at the quantum level are probably not conscious.

Very much in agreement, lol, yes.

So rephrasing the question:

What reason is there to believe that quantum mechanics are required to explain consciousness?

I see none at all.

I don't see any reason to believe that our consciousness or even cognizance rely, meaningfully, on quantum effects, myself.