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by kipchak
811 days ago
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I have trouble seeing the definite utility of consciousness in terms of evolutionary fitness. Assuming consciousness isn't somehow necessary for intelligence or associative learning and that it plays a somewhat subserviently role to unconscious mechanisms, consciousness seems potentially less efficient than unconscious mechanisms. For example when physically avoiding a collision while driving conscious thought is often too slow. Intuitively the role of consciousness as a supervisor of faster unconscious mechanisms seems to be to review the unconscious and perform some sort of steering or review of it. But I'm not sure it's obvious consciousness is effective at doing this. For example in ironic process theory trying to consciously will away a thought takes resources which increases the prevalence of that thought. "Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute." Some of the concerns for consciousness in a evolutionary model are better outlined here. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.... |
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At that point in its life, consciousness might not be much of a help to it, but here's a similar question: when an antelope first sees a pride of lions in the distance, could it be of evolutionary advantage for it to feel anxious? From there, we can step to an even more pertinent question: if an early human or close hominin ancestor contemplated the possibility of a pride of lions moving into their neighborhood, could it have been advantageous for them to feel anxious?
One response that does not seem far-fetched is that it might prompt the individual to think about how to defend against the threat. This would involve considering various scenarios and how they would play out. This is not just a matter of recalling past events, as these are hypothetical scenarios. Istead, it is a matter of synthesizing an imagined scenario from memories - but there is a phenomenal - 'what it is like' - aspect to memories, some combination of recalling the original phenomenal experience itself or the phenomenal experience of how one felt at the time. Any less direct association between what we experience in the world and how we think about it seems both unnecessarily complex and at risk of our imagination becoming completely detached from the world we live in.
I can't prove that this is how it works, but in this view, it is quite plausible that phenomenal consciousness was a key prerequisite for the route by which we acquired our higher mental abilities (including explicit self-awareness and a theory of mind about other people), and is necessary now. You can claim that all these abilities are possible without phenomenal experience, but even if that were so, it does not follow that phenomenal consciousness is evolutionarily impotent, as evolution can only work by small increments, so we do not see, for example, macroscopic organisms with wheels. It is not clear that there is a path to this allegedly superior mind even if it is possible.
Furthermore, if phenomenal consciousness is evolutionarily impotent and suboptimal, how did we get it, and why does it not atrophy (which is the fate of all other biological features once they are no longer advantageous)? Panpsychists want to summarily reject an incomplete hypothesis and substitute one that redefines the whole universe to make consciousness fundamental, while saying literally next to nothing about what that means, what consciousness is, and how it works.
Thanks for the reference by the way; I keep a small collection of these sorts of thing.