[visarga]

No, consciousness requires

- a purpose - why would the universe need it?

- a mechanism - how would learning occur?

- a source of learning - that is the environment, what is the environment of the universe? doesn't make sense

What I think are good signs for possibility of consciousness:

- a self replicating agent, with the ability to perfectly copy and multiply its code

- limited resources, leading to competition

- other agents, forming a complex environment based on cooperation and competition

Why is it necessary to have many agents? Because evolution is a blind, open-ended search. The more attempts the faster it goes.

Consciousness makes sense for agents who have to navigate complex environments to survive. It needs to be localized, subjective, the universe would not have that property.

[ebb_earl_co]

This is good reasoning, but from where did you get the requirements? After having read Annaka Harris’ “Conscious” and Philip Goff’s “Galileo’s Error”, it seems plausible to me (and the most logically simple resolution) that panpsychism explains the universe.

I.e., in the vain search for the place to draw “the line” between what animals or systems are conscious and which aren’t, (viruses? Amoebas? The smallest insect?) what if consciousness can be seen as a property of existence? Then, clearly, different systems (such as humans) have wildly different experiences (a.k.a. contents of consciousness) than rocks or shrimp or trees etc., but if you take Thomas Nagel’s phrasing for this—that if there is something it is like to be a rock or a shrimp or a tree, then that is conscious—then it seems to me that there IS something that it is like to be the cosmos.

[friend_and_foe]

I would argue that consciousness doesn't require a purpose. I woke up here, what was my purpose? If I don't decide that purpose, what does? How is that thing able to give me one and not be conscious in some way? Evolution has no purpose other than it's own continuation, which is interestingly also the only purpose I was born with. I'd say purpose is innate to consciousness, emergent with it, but not a precursor. The universe doesn't need me here.

Does the process of evolution "learn"? I'd say empirically yes it does, but there's no organ or part of it that does the learning, learning is just innate as well. The system learns and the evidence of what it has learned are apparent in it's form.

Go down the list, evolution, the biosphere, meets all these criteria except for replication. It hasn't replicated, but it does appear it is learning how to do so. So is the biosphere conscious in it's own way? I don't know, but either answer is problematic for your set of axioms, so I don't think they're correct.

So let's get a little more curious. If I'm conscious, and I'm part of the universe, does that mean that the universe is conscious? And if so, was it conscious in some way before I opened memy eyes for the first time? On the first question I'd argue yes, it is conscious at least to the degree I am and with awareness at least as far as mine goes, seeing as I'm not merely inside the universe, but am an inseparable part of it. Further, though I don't know for certain if there are other conscious beings in the universe, I observe several around me that appear to have the same form and behavior that I have, I'd wager that my parents and such are also conscious, so the universe probably has a consciousness beyond just mine. On the second question, it's not so straightforward, but considering that this consciousness that I have comes from something in the universe I think a "yes" to this one would be more likely to be the right answer than a "no". It would appear that some constants, rules, traits of the universe not only allow for consciousness, but select for it via convergent evolution. There is, at the very least, something fundamental about the universe that emerges as consciousness somewhere inside it.

[lxgr]

I think you're mixing up intelligence (i.e. having a model of self, being able to learn and all of that) and consciousness (having qualia) here.

In a non-panpsychic universe, p-zombies might well have a model of self without being conscious.

[entropyneur]

I am conscious. What's the purpose of me having consciousness? As far as can tell I could have functioned the exact same way without experiencing anything whatsoever.

[visarga]

My tongue in cheek answer is that you need consciousness in order to get up in the morning and eat something, or else you die. What are the chances that food comes on its own into your mouth?

The serious answer: consciousness has the role to protect the body by adapting to the environment. At the same time consciousness is based on system trained with environment data, all we know comes from outside.

[proc0]

As you point out, that list is only necessary for the evolution of consciousness (perhaps) but it is not a requirement for consciousness itself.

From a functional computatoinalist POV, consciousness just requires information processing. People who meditate a lot can attest to the fact that conscious experience doesn't even need a self, it doesn't need thoughts, purpose or anything else. Consciousness is just raw awareness (meta-awareness)... however since we know the brain is processing information at some capacity (i.e. search Phineas Gage), then consciousness is something like the running simulation of reality being processed by the brain.

Joscha Bach, Max Tegmark, are two good sources for this perspective.