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TJ Radcliffe's avatar

Consciousness is an ordinary evolved characteristic, like legs or jawbones. Organisms with a greater endowment of physical capacities that permitted meta-regulatory behaviour were more reproductively successful than those with less.

Awareness, and self-awareness, are powerful behavioural regulatory tools.

Does this "contradict physics"?

It happened. Ergo it does not contradict physics, even if we don't understand it.

Declarations of impossibility do not have a good history when talking about evolution, so I'm happy wallowing in ignorance for another few thousand years while we dig more deeply into the details and understand what's going on better. While doing so I like to meditate on Orgel's second law: Evolution is smarter than I am.

There's already a bunch of stuff we know, like conscious control only comes into play when everything else fails, and that conscious likes to think it's in charge, so any experiments that involve choices that *could* be made subconsciously (all the action potential work, so far as I know) are investigating the subconscious, not consciousness.

But we also know consciousness is capable of solving problems non-conscious intelligence can't--there's a theorem by Church that demonstrates we can solve the halting problem for cases a Turing machine, the ultimate unconscious intelligence, can't--so that's a strong pointer that it evolved for purely utilitarian reasons, like everything else.

Again: I don't know *how* this happened or how it works, but the why is pretty clear: consciousness is an evolved capability that allows organisms that possess it to regulate their behaviour in ways that organisms lacking it can't. Not knowing how it works is just ordinary science, in a state of total confusion for decades or centuries while we figure it out. But in this case at least we know where to look!

https://worldofwonders.substack.com/p/the-nature-of-consciousness

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N0st's avatar

I think this (the "hard problem of consciousness") is the type of problem that feels mysterious because of an assumed Cartesian dualism. As in, the assumption is that what we each really are is a detached, purely neutral observer that can sense what is going on without any messy contact with reality. Or in other words, that the mind is a container that merely represents nature rather than actually being a part of it. When you start with these assumptions, yes, it does feel very mysterious how such a pure separate thing that merely represents facts could interact with the world of matter. I think if you don't start with the assumption that the mind is over and above and separate from matter, then the problem doesn't feel as mysterious. Basically the answer is that feelings aren't something tacked on excessively to minds, but they are (part of) the functioning of the mind.

For related ideas on pragmatist views of the mind:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey/#Mind

Or for a book length treatment:

Out of the Cave: A Natural Philosophy of Mind and Knowing by Don M. Tucker and Mark Johnson

Interesting book on similar ideas:

The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill by Tim Ingold

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