And wetness is only a sensed quality because of brain patterns that were interconnected as self survival motivating drivers linked relevant environment models to give context and survive/thrive meaning to touching something wet.
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Replying to @SurviveThrive2 @Plinz and
Drifting away from the subject of consciousness but … this an evolutionary Just So Story? Is there value in believing it?
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Replying to @chrisfcarroll @Plinz and
Acknowledging that consciousness is simply the function of sensing and responding to data for self survival (which is different than a machine function) is more than inconsequential evolutionary semantics. It impacts everything from intelligence, ethics, behavior, self, to AI.
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Replying to @SurviveThrive2 @Plinz and
It's the word 'Acknowledging' I can't go with. 'Believing' is the word I would put in there. I don't believe. Specifically I don't believe that either humanness or consciousness can be explained well by evolution So I agree with you on the impact; I expect some of it to be bad.
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Replying to @chrisfcarroll @Plinz and
Belief is more of a hope with slim evidence. Evolution which is generally well accepted, suggests that successful self survival, relative to environment pressures, determines heritable characteristics. It's odd that consciousness is considered an inexplicable exception. It isn't.
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Replying to @SurviveThrive2 @Plinz and
No no it's not odd! To optimise a fitness function over cellular behaviour & gene selection, phenomenology is /utterly/ irrelevant. There cannot be pressure to select for it any more than calculating the fitness function on paper can select for the colour of ink it's written in.
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Replying to @chrisfcarroll @SurviveThrive2 and
smh. If you conceptualize physiological affect as a fundamental characteristic of biological life, then your problem with phenomenology drops out. It “feels like something” to be a biological organism.
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Replying to @SimsYStuart @chrisfcarroll and
And as the organism increases in size and evolves in complexity, that fundamental characteristic of physiological hedonic affect increases in acuity. The purpose of hedonic affect (positive/ negative valences) is to code survival values.
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Replying to @SimsYStuart @chrisfcarroll and
I actually don’t see how you can correctly conceptualize biological evolution without characterizing affect as a fundamental aspect.
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Replying to @SimsYStuart @SurviveThrive2 and
You may be right … but I understand both Plinz & Clarity to be arguing for a 'hard' physicalism (material eliminativist re consciousness?) which insists that affect must first be understand as purely computational (plus biochemical?) If I've read them right?
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I am just arguing that the known alternatives to computationalism are not viable. Materialism is an unfortunate term because most people have strong unreflected intuitions about the nature of matter.
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