Natural Selection Seems Insufficient

[Jal]

"For someone who argues that there are degrees of sentience, this is a particularly daft objection.  Consciousness evolved by degrees.  Same as is required by your argument." That's somewhat like conflating abiogenesis and evolutoin, claiming they are the exact same thing. Emergent consciousness is claim vastly less probable than the claim that consciousness was already present but matured in degrees. 

On what basis do you conclude it is less probable?   We know that mind comes in varying expressions among animals.  We don't know that there is an expression of it in rocks, for which there is no evidence.  That's an asymmetry you need to answer with something other than assuming pansychism.

"You are arguing that things like hunger, libido, and such are epiphenomenal. " That's precisely the opposite of my claim. I regard them as innate, albeit initially in negligible degrees of acuteness. 

  
Innate isn't opposed to epiphenomenal.  Try learning what words actually mean.

"To argue that such a terminus is unreasonable with regard to basic forces such as gravity, but not with respect to your own brute facts is to engage in a double standard." I am not convinced it's a double standard. LOGICALLY and EMPIRICALLY, I cannot pull your body from a distance. I must reach out and touch you. Gravity contradicts what we seem to know. yet it is easily explained by a physical God whose hand is doing precisely that - reaching out and touching matter.

Gravity doesn't present any obvious contradiction any more than sentient rocks presents a contradiction to what we know.  The charge of a double standard remains unanswered.

"Innate isn't opposed to epiphenomenal.  Try learning what words actually mean."  Don't exaggerate.  I don't think my usage of the term was exponentially skewed. Quick google:
 
"Most epiphenomenalists have been physicalists or property dualists who think consciousness arises when matter is organized in certain complex ways, such as in brains. On this view:

• Electrons are not conscious.
  
• Rocks are not conscious.
  
• Conscious experience emerges from complex neural activity.
  

"Emergent consciousness" is, in my understanding, antithetical to innate consciousness.  In my view, for example, electrons ARE conscious.