I’ve decided to publish a few articles on intellectual topics. I’m not changing the main focus of the blog; it will continue to emphasize experience and information that’s useful and interesting to spiritual seekers.<\/i><\/p>\n
I’m going to describe an idea that first occurred to me several decades ago. It’s a weak argument and a vague one but it may be of use as an idea. It’s very simple; it can be stated in a few paragraphs. Some readers may think I have panpsychism in mind but I don’t; if you want to put this idea in a bucket, Advaita Vedanta is a much better fit.<\/p>\n
As far as I can recall, I’ve never written this idea down because I assumed it had occurred to other people, especially academics in the field of philosophy of consciousness, who had presumably published it. Lately it occurred to me that I could use one of the new large language models to do a literature search for this idea. Trying this in early 2024, I’ve had the best results with Claude 3 Opus. To my surprise, the LLM couldn’t find the idea anywhere. It did find published passages with related ideas but the relationships were weak. If the LLM was right, the idea has never been published. This seems unlikely to me but it’s possible so I’ve decided to publish it here.<\/p>\n
When I use the word “consciousness,” I mean that which enables experience. I don’t mean qualia. I mean that which makes experience of qualia possible, or that which has such experiences. I’m following the traditional Indian idea that consciousness and mental activity are different sorts of stuff. Like Cartesian dualism, Indian philosophy divides reality into two main parts, but the two traditions differ in where they locate mental activity. Indian philosophy puts consciousness by itself in one category and mental activity together with the physical world in the other.<\/p>\n
Here’s the idea. If there’s anything new here, it’s mostly in the last paragraph:<\/p>\n
It has occurred to many of us that everything that animal bodies do, they could do without consciousness. For example, they don’t need to feel thirst in order to drink. Brains could have evolved in such a way that when they notice that blood volume is low, they directly command the body to find water and drink. But brains didn’t evolve that way. Instead there’s a complicated mechanism that uses consciousness as an intermediary<\/i>. Instead of commanding the body to do something, brains create a feeling of thirst, which requires consciousness, and then something — presumably the brain itself — reacts to thirst by performing the desired actions. <\/p>\n
From the brain, to consciousness, back to the brain. Note that the intermediate step is part of the machinery because without thirst, the body wouldn’t do what the brain wants it to do. On first consideration this seems to me a sort of Rube Goldberg design. If gravity were designed this way, epicycles would actually exist. I mention this in passing; it leads to some interesting ideas. But for now, I think it’s sufficient to observe that a robot could be built that could replenish its store of fluid when it’s low without being conscious. Presumably animals could have evolved the same way. But they didn’t. <\/p>\n
Why would natural selection go out of its way to produce consciousness and design mechanisms based on it when it didn’t need to bother? We can think of several possible explanations — I’m not suggesting that the explanation I’m about to offer is the only one, and therefore I’m not suggesting that the argument on this page is any sort of proof — but one possibility is that consciousness already existed when animal nervous systems began to evolve. It was “there” somehow although I can’t say where or how exactly. It was there and evolution made use of it because it was convenient for evolution to do so. The situation was a little bit like plants evolving photosynthesis because sunlight was there. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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