Consciousness: Dennett says it is an illusion (General)

by dhw, Thursday, October 03, 2019, 13:11 (1876 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I referred you to the article because you claimed there were only three or four scientists who advocated cellular intelligence. Just google the subject, and you will find many more names. The Wikipedia article offers several under references and further reading.

DAVID: You've ignored my discussion about the unreliability of Wikipedia, as a private unregulated publication.

I only asked you to look at the list of names, and invited you also to look at other websites, just to show you that there are more than three or four scientists who advocate cellular intelligence. Do think the names and references and articles on other websites are all made up?

dhw: Consciousness is not present only in humans. You wrote: “Consciousness has appeared only when a brain evolved that was complex enough to accept it. I still view that animals with a brain are conscious; nothing is conscious at lower levels of development.”

DAVID: Animals do not have consciousness with self-awareness They are simply conscious. Why do you constantly ignore the point?

You wrote; “Consciousness is only present in humans”, thereby contradicting your statement: “I still view that animals with a brain are conscious”. If you had written “Self-awareness is only present in humans”, I would not have corrected you.

DAVID: [Consciousness] did not evolve from anything materialistic, Egnor's point.

Correct. This was the quote, with my answer following:

QUOTE: "...if consciousness is non-physical, how could it evolve? Darwinian natural selection can only act on a physical attribute."
dhw: Evolution means change, and it is neither synonymous with natural selection (which does not create the changes necessary for evolution, but only decides which changes will survive) nor confined to physical attributes! If we accept the definition of consciousness as awareness (what else is it?) then just like biological organisms, it has evolved through an accumulation of factors from the past coupled with present innovations. That applies both to dualistic and materialistic consciousness…

I keep pointing out that ‘evolve’ is not the same as ‘originate’. Nobody knows the origin of life, consciousness, reproduction or the mechanisms of evolution, all of which represent Chapter 1 in the history of life. Evolution is Chapter 2, the process whereby changes take place in what already exists, while natural selection determines what changes survive. This applies to consciousness just as it applies to physical organisms, which is why Egnor’s attempted analogy doesn’t work. If he had written “natural selection can only act on a physical attribute that already exists”, he would have realized his error, since evolution and natural selection can also act on non-physical attributes that already exist. In a nutshell: neither evolution nor natural selection can explain the origin of physical life or – if it exists – of immaterial “life”, including consciousness, but both the material and the immaterial can be changed by evolution, and the survival of the changes will be determined by natural selection.