Consciousness

[Angrboda]

And Solon considered that only the dead were truly fortunate.

Choice and will, ignoring that in my view they both are just dependent responses, are difficult to discern in the same way that intelligent design is difficult to detect, because it's an artificial attribute attached to a collection of things, based on suppositions about processes "independent of the thing being examined." If we knew all the potential processes by which a thing could be designed, and the history of any specific artifact, we'd know whether it was designed or not. But instead, we're left looking for the appearance of design, which doesn't appear to differ in any systematic way from the appearance of undesigned structural or genitive order. Because they're attempting to infer design from the ways in which the finished products, designed or not, differ from each other, they're reasoning backwards from effect to cause, which is very difficult. In much the same way, people who are attempting to infer consciousness, or the awareness of pain or whatever, are performing a similar operation: attempting to reason backward from the effect — the behavior — to the causative process, namely consciousness or awareness. And just as it's almost impossible to tell in any systematic way, reasoning backward from the effect in design, so it's near impossible to set forth what "the appearance" of consciously motivated behavior would look like. (And people who know lovers who return time and time again to bad relationships know, it's not always clear in our own case; enter the emergence of the unconscious and psychotherapy.) Moreover, we are biologically loaded to "over-perceive" purpose and intent in our environment, in addition to being weak reasoners, infected with strong distorting cognitive biases; so we're geared to see the presence of design and intelligence even where it isn't present.

Thus the unending debate about free will, for one. My views on the subject are well known; I don't view the behaviors of the fly as categorically different from ours: they're both composed of neural circuits performing computations. Nothing more. So I guess I'd turn the question around and ask why you feel being you is all that different from being a gorilla or a poodle? To me, there's likely more similarity than difference, including in those aspects in which you consider yourselves distinctive. I, too, set the bar rather low, but for a different reason. I suspect that the primary purpose of consciousness, originally, was to form a coherent representation of "the self" in order to allow for coordinated, self-interested behaviors (and by self, I don't mean mental attributes like emotions, ideas, self-reflection and so on; when I refer to consciousness as being the evolution of a "self representation", I'm referring to the basic components such as the self having a body, being "inside" the body, that "its thoughts" cause the body to do things, that "its eyes" see the world from the perspective of the body [not exactly true, as human selves are situated "within" a three dimensional world, which seems the default, even in the absence of physical confirmation of the fact]). The consciousness that I'm thinking of is just a model for coordinating the needs of the organism with its knowledge of the environment which permits the emergence of complex behaviors "keyed" to certain combinations. I'm certain that very complex behaviors are possible without an integrated model of self and environment. However, I think a rudimentary consciousness of this sort would be a natural development, and be adaptive. Over time, perhaps, additions to the mental machinery generating this model would occur, adding additional features and nuances [like the modeling of other minds or the incorporation of linguistic elements]. However, I don't think there is likely any "quantum leap" from such early, rudimentary consciousness; just incremental steps, and occasional additions (for example, consider Julian Jaynes' thesis of the emergence of [modern] consciousness in the [alleged] breakdown of the bicameral mind; a subtle qualitative shift in the model, but all the pieces are essentially there both before and after).

(ps. I forget which book it was in, but there's a condition in which the information from the inner ear, regarding balance, is defective or defectively relayed to the brain. Such people may have the continual experience that they are falling, even when they are lying on the ground. It just shows how visceral our perception of the self is. [There's also some interesting observation's in Damasio's Self Comes To Mind; for most of our sensory nerves, they're divided into nerves which monitor the viscera, or internal organs, and those which monitor other things, and different brain circuits serve each. The brain, consciousness or no, is essentially the body's slave, structured to serve its needs. So much for Plato's 'spiritual' component of human nature.])