The Philosophy of Mind: Zombies, "radical emergence" and evidence of non-experiential

[Angrboda]

On the contrary, the scientific evidence actually supports the idea that consciousness doesn't do anything useful. For starters there's the scientific experiments I mentioned. And that's just the start.

Take a look at this for example:

Moving from the how to the why, Dennett suggests that we can give an evolutionary explanation of why conscious experience exists: it exists because it has survival value. It is, however, a notorious fact that it is not yet possible to give a direct evolutionary explanation of the existence of conscious experience. This may seem very implausible. It may seem obvious that vision, say, has survival value. But a creature could enjoy all the benefits of vision without having any actual, conscious visual experience. It could have light-sensitive organs that enabled it to register information about its environment without having any visual experience (machines that do this can be easily constructed). The same can be said about pain. Experience of pain seems obviously useful because it motivates one to avoid sources of damage. But the tendency to avoid sources of damage could evolve without involving pain. Damage-recognition mechanisms could trigger damage-source-avoidance behaviour without there having to be any actual feeling of  pain, or any other sort of experience. Perhaps some actual organisms on earth are like this.

Strawson is simply begging the question here. Perhaps it's possible, perhaps it isn't. He doesn't know. Anyway, Khemikal's point is valid here, even if an alternative implementation is possible, that says nothing about the actual implementation, nor about it's relative position within naturally occurring selective pressures and the phenotypic space in play.

Then again, maybe I don't want to be a part of this discussion after all....