Does anyone know why humans evolved consciousness...

Weak and fragile compared to what? We are relatively big animals with a very good endurance (especially in hot climates) and good climate tolerance who can throw rocks at things very well even without the whole intelligence thing.
The most primitive hunter-gatherers in Africa, Australia and Polynesia were doing very fine even without almost no tools until recently.

There's no proof that consciousness is something that life evolved to have.

>be nature
>ruthless war of all against all
>survival of fittest
>develop consciousness
>become a faggot
What did she mean by this?

>why it's evolutionarily required for me to experience my senses
Your experiences ARE sensations. It's logically necessary.

If strong general AIs come about, I expect they will behave as if counsciousness. And that's really the only criteria I use to recognize other people besides myself as counsciousness, so no biggie. If by "counscious" you just mean "has sensations" rather than all the higher functions we associate with the term, I'd argue that some artificial neural networks that can learn through conditioning are already marginally sentient.

How is it logically necessary? Ai can interpret data without consciousness. Why cant our brains?

divine intervention would be the only alternative i could think of. unlikely.

side effect of being smart

if you need someone to explain why being smart is important for humans to survive and reproduce, kys

>side effect of being smart
prove how the two are confounded

...

Experiences are sensations. Experiencing and sensing are pretty much the same thing. Though I suppose we tend to associate the term "experiences" to stronger feels, while we relate "sensations" to all feels.

Your brain does intrepret a lot of data outside of your counsciousness. Counsciousness isn't really required for doing all the stuff that makes you you, just for a few higher functions. You could say that it sort of high-lights info that comes to it from lower-level processing then feeds it back into lower level processing.

what else could explain consciousness other than evolution?

God is at the root of the creation of Man. A "bio-computer" would be convincing and all, but it would lack a spirit-soul monad.

>experiences are sensations

Tactic 21, Meet Him with a Counterargument as Bad as His

Consciousness exists and would therefore invariably manifest itself. Fundamentally speaking, You can't create or destroy anything, so this is a metaphysical truth and inevitable.

you need to think to be conscious

why do I have to explain every itty bitty thing, kys

>why do i have to prove my claim or at least explain how it's a valid hypothesis

Because you need to sort your thoughts and plan things in order to make tools, maneuver social situations and hunt animals you fuckhead

Then how is it i can clear my mind of all thoughts and still have incoming sense data?

>i can clear my mind of all thoughts
You can't.

You're not actually clearing your mind of all thoughts, your conscious brain is still working.

The Anunaki

I don't have any answers. I'm an atheist, by the way. I just know that to me, the idea that matter somehow gives rise to consciousness seems just as unlikely as divine intervention. In fact, it seems like exactly the same thing. If you believe that consciousness just suddenly appears when you organize matter a certain way, you're not really providing an explanation that is any more scientific than divine intervention, you're just using a different kind of language to describe it. The truth is that probably nobody has the slightest idea how consciousness originates. The "hard problem" of consciousness has resisted all assaults on it.

it's working, but not necessarily thinking. that's just semantics.

It is thinking, jesus christ dude. If you can recall an event, you were conscious.

>side effect of being smart
That's pure speculation on your part.

Drop it Kant, rationalism is is for the naive positivists.

All in your mind is a perception, which I what I meant by "sensation" (which I used to tie in with "senses"). Hume himself would divide perceptions into perceptions and ideas, the first being more intense and the second being lighter versions of it (like, the impression of the colour red you get when you see it would be "real" than the idea of the colour red that I can evoke in you by mentioning it). Then divide impressions into "sensations" (here in Hume it has a more strict definition than I would use) and "reflections" based on wether you perceive your perceptions as originating outside of you or inside of your mind, respectively. I myself consider the distinction between these two shallow. I wouldn't say schizos aren't capable of reflection, even though they have trouble distinguishing external stimulii from outside stimulii (hence why they confuse fleeting thoughts and products of their imagination with actual voices and physical entities).

You should know, most neuroscientists, neurologists, neuropsychologists, etc, consider counsciousness to be in a spectrum.

One theory is that we gained it from eating magic mushrooms a lot

>David Hume
>calling anyone else naive

I mean kantists are the worst but c'mon man

Though maybe possible it's a huge stretch and needing to make tools and fire probably drove the huge burst in brain size more than anything else. Remember, humans evolved from apes who were already making tools and making fire. We just are a species that perfected it.

>Hume
>naive
He was literally a (moderate) skeptic.

>All in your mind is perception

This can't account for analysis, or intuition. Essentially, for the subjective aspect. That's the problem of Hume's philosophy, and it's why he couldn't give a coherent description of causality other than "it's just habit." That isn't to say his hierarchy of the understanding (perception ----> impression ----> idea) isn't fundamentally correct, Kant uses it extensively.

I tend to understand intuition and analysis more like processes, rather than objects, which is how I feel Hume tends to approach these notions of "perceptions", "impressions", "ideas", etc. Still, about those processes you mentioned, we experience them, we derive perceptions from them, that is how we know they occur. Analyses for instance could construed as the break-downs of perceptions into further perceptions (there would be more to that, but I'm interested in how these relate to perception, rather than the things happening at the levels below). What Kant means by "intuition" and "intuitions" is kinda of a headscratcher for me, I'll be honest. I much prefer reading Hume.

I do understand your point there in the greentext so let me rephrase: All the things that reach your counsciousness are perceptions. That isn't to say there aren't perceptions that don't reach what you'd call counsciousness (again, counsciousness is stricly tied to memory and atention, and where your degree of counsciousness falls on the spectrum relates to how "on" are these cognitive faculties), but most content that isn't high-lighted quick enough fades from your mind before you become able to recollect it.

Intuition is the process by which the understanding relates to conceptions. Kant uses math, and in one specific case the proposition "5+7 = 12," as examples of "synthetic" (I do not agree with his synthetic/analytic distinction) a priori intuitions. But this is where I break with him; to understand that 5 + 7 = 12 indeed requires intuition, in the sense that you must reapply the general category of quantity to a sensible object in order to grasp the specific outcome at first (e.g. a child without mathematical knowledge counting up to twelve using buttons, or grapes, etc.), but this is not "synthetic" in the conceptual sense, since if the conception of addition were not already contained in the proposition, there would be no way to logically solve it. If he had used the example, "1 + 1 = 2," he would have a much harder time maintaining what he does of the above, namely that "12 is not contained within the analytic conception of 7 + 5."

The problem with describing analysis as a "break down in perceptions" is that this account does not leave room for high-level abstractions e.g. wealth, which is not something that can ever be directly perceived, but is still applicable as a concept. That's not to say it's "real" in the way that a sensible object is, but as a subjective cogitation, it is useful for qualifying human behavior.

God I feel like a Kantian pic related typing this shit

Who says we did. The cogito only covers consciousness' introspection not its locality.

Imagine a computer that processes information then as time passes the information it can process gets more complex. More time passes and the information causes the creation of new programs which when used with the analysis create new actions in the computer. Time passes yet again and the computer is capable of fluid processing or commiting actions without preprogrammed scripts then eventually gains self awareness as a side effect of fluid information processing.

The problem with A.I is that scientist havent figured out how to make fluid thinking in them, they just run off scripts.

I'd argue that the "can never be directly perceived" distinction would just mean that Hume wouldn't consider it an impression as much as an idea, but still very much a perception.

I can't really touch the other paragraph right now without making an ass of myself, though I feel it sounds interesting the point you make. I should've been asleep 3 hours ago. G'night.

But that's playing on an ambiguity, since that only covers half of the sense of concepts. That is, wealth is obviously a concept applicable only to certain phenomena as they relate to other phenomena, i.e. it functions in the understanding rather than in reason, but this does not mean it is a phenomenon itself, which is what it would have to be, if it reached you directly by means of perception through impression.

Good night. I'm glad to have had at least a partial discussion who isn't an absolute chowderhead.

>Weak and fragile compared to what?
A chimp would rip your face off

>Why humans evolved consciousness?
Define consciousness. (Good luck with that.)

If you, for instance, define consciousness as experience and memory, a camcorder does that. If you define it as qualia, as "having an experience" anything does or does not have that, you can only know it for yourself.

Most higher critters are sentient (mammals, birds, lizards), and the reason for that is obvious. Not all are sapient. Sapience certainly has rather obvious advantages, such as eventually granting us the ability to have this conversation from different ends of the planet at the speed of light.

>wouldnt an unfeeling bio-computer get the job of reproduction done just as well?
Feelings are merely a maximal consensus between the various neurological centers, lower and higher, coupled with input from the body. Animals developed feelings as there is just far too much information to process to make decisions in real time, and the communication processes between the various centers isn't exact, with no priorities provided. Without feelings, you are paralyzed to make decisions and set axioms, particularly if all the options are much alike. There are people who suffer this affliction to one degree or another, usually due to brain damage resulting in a lack of communication between their limbic and frontal cortex. They are invariably wrecks of human beings, unable to make the simplest decisions - they can take an hour to decide what color pen to use to sign a document, or a whole day to choose a cereal in the store isle.

Expert systems, such as Watson, when set to a time limit, have algorithms to abort to nearest logical answer. These serve the same purpose as "feelings" for such systems, allowing them to jump to correct conclusions rather than mulling over the available data endlessly. They don't allow such systems to set axioms, but that's a leap in artificial intelligence we've yet to make. We may find the end solution is very much like the one nature made for us.