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

[bennyboy]

Here's the thing, though.  You seem to be giving a final cause, which I'd say is a pretty idealistic view: "Well, consciousness helps an organism to thrive in its environment."  But the point of interest is how or why there can be such a thing as consciousness.

Answered in ast as a form of internal (and in more elaborate implementations, environmental and projective) modeling.

I seriously doubt that the philosophical question is answered: why is it that any physical system, under any configuration, has the capacity to experience qualia?  Why is there such a thing as subjective experience in a world view which is (at least in theory) modeled purely in objective terms?

I don't want to read your link just yet, because I doubt it answers the philosophical question at hand.  If it does, would you mind giving a short-form version?  If it's compelling at all, then I'll be happy to read up on AST.

--edit--
I think my issue is that qualia isn't considered elemental in a material view. So either there's a critical mass of something (information, electric fields of a certain configuration, whatever) which suddenly spawns a quale, or there's an incremental process by which more complex systems have something more and more like qualia. But qualia-gony (lol) is binary: either something is being experienced, or it isn't. I cannot conceive that there is "more and more experienced."