The Scripture Is False And The Biblical God Is Dead.

[GrandizerII]

I agree with you that planning for tomorrow has practical utility. I don't think even Dmitry is disputing that.

The question is whether phenomenal consciousness (that which involves qualia) has any practical utility.

Can you explain how we'd do any planning without consciousness? No self-awareness, no awareness of the future, no planning for any self in any future.

If you write code using complicated nestings of conditional statements (if/else statements), you have pretty much built something artificial that can do something akin to planning/decision-making (at least in the rudimentary sense) without the need for any qualia whatsoever. So it seems to me, then, that it is possible for an organism like the human being to plan ahead without any "inner movie running in their head".

Let's consider the example brought up by Dmitry: pain induced by a needle. Whatever do we need to have this awful feeling of pain for? Is our body being conditioned/primed to avoid/prepare for such similar pain-triggering stimuli in the future not sufficient to keep us surviving?

Pain is little more than a damage indicator. Don't do this, it hurts. About as complicated as a check engine light. There's some pretty obvious survival advantage to avoiding an unnecessarily punctured hide.

And if pain is DMitry's bar for qualia then he's just thrown humanish p-zombies out the window. Every organism down to and including single-celled organisms exhibit some level of distress when damaged. It's about as fundamental a reaction as you can find.

Yeah, but there is also the feeling of pain as well. That is what Dmitry is referring to, not the outward behavior exhibiting it (or the activities in the nervous system that lead to it), but the inner subjective feeling of it.

And yeah, hypothetically, you could have p-zombie versions of dogs and other non-human animals that we believe have consciousness. It's not just humans beings that have phenomenal consciousness, of course. But I don't know if something like a bacterium would have that. Seems like ultimately, it's connected to the brain (at least in the case of living organisms on earth), and bacteria don't have brains.