Trying to simplify my Consciousness hypothesis

[bennyboy]

Why would evolution arrive at a by-product which cannot be seen, cannot be measured, and is known only to exist through subjective agency?  Saying "consciousness is useful" is pretty meaningless when consciousness is only a collection of material interactions.  Why wouldn't a brain just take in data, process it, and output behavior, without the organism ever knowing what it's like  to experience hot chocolate in early fall or whatever?

This is the real problem-- if physical interactions are sufficient to explain behavior, then why would the universe give us this added "bonus" of being aware of those physical interactions?

What do you mean "Why would it?" Why wouldn't it? Evolution has useless side effects and by products left over all the time. There's no purpose to it it's purposeless.

An extra appendage, a malformed foot or a vestigial organ is not in the same category as the capacity to subjectively experience. All those other things, all the ones you could possibly discuss, are philosophically neutral. The ability to experience what things are like is a really different issue-- it's not derived from anything else, it doesn't contribute to anything else, it is not even physically detectable, and yet it is clearly the most important aspect of human existence.

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What about if the computer was a 100% perfect simulation of all the neurons, dendrites, synapses and neurotransmitters in a real brain, and you then plugged it into a real body with senses?

Why wouldn't it have an equal experience of dust or blue skies?

Why would it?

What about instead of using a computer, you created an agent controller using cells and put that in a body? Would that then be able to experience? If so, why? Or why not?

The key requirement here is that the agent controller needs to be embodied in an environment and be able to sense and act within it.

Is that the key requirement? If you had a non-organic system, and it could do the things you say are key, would you know that it was really experiencing, rather than just seeming to?

Let's view this as a hypothesis: "Systems with requirements X and Y have the capacity to subjectively experience what things are like (i.e. qualia)." How would you go about proving this hypothesis? Ask it, "Siri. . . are you conscious?" "Yes, Dave, I am. Super-duper, fully aware."

Assumptions that you have to have reached a certain level of mental development in order to experience things can lead to really immoral acts. The medical profession used to only give anaesthesia to adults for this very reason. My dad for example remembers having his tonsils cut out of him without anaesthetic when he was a young boy. It's the same mentality that leads to animal or cruelty or abuse of children.

Eh? Are you saying all of this for a reason? I don't see the connection to anything I said. It seems to be an attempt to support a philosophical position with an emotional appeal: "Yes, but what about the CHILDREN?" and eventually maybe, "Well. . . YOU say the bennotron 3000 isn't really alive. . . but what if you're WRONG?"

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How come seemingly immaterial emotions can have a physical emotion? Take stress for example, how come an abundant amount of stress can take a toll on us physically? Or nervous causing our heart rate to rise? Maybe those feelings are just our other body parts reporting back to the brain in simplistic terms

There's no doubt about the interaction between the body and qualia. Simply, if I didn't have eyes, I couldn't see things. If I didn't have a brain, there probably would be no "me" to experience anything at all. But that doesn't change the essential problem: why is it that there is any such thing as qualia, anywhere in the universe? Why would any system, under any configuration, actually know what it's like to experience things, rather than just mindlessly grinding through its physical interactions? Why isn't humanity a collection of 7 billion philosophical zombies?


If the universe is nothing but materials, their processes, and their physical transformations, then where does subjective agency fit into all this? It is irrelevant to the mechanism. Imagine this-- let's say there were a universe identical to this one, with one exception-- no qualia experienced by anything. Then look at this universe, identical but with qualia. What's the difference in physical function? Zero. So to insist that the universe is nothing but physical function is to introduce a ghost into the equation.