Consciousness: Dennett says it is an illusion (General)

by David Turell , Thursday, October 03, 2019, 16:27 (1876 days ago) @ dhw

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?

dhw: 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.

My definitions and yours are different. All animals are aware and therefore conscious. By definition only humans have consciousness which causes self-awareness.

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

dhw: 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…

dhw: 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. (n ote my bold)

I think you are wrong. I don't see evolution or natural selection acting on consciousness which is immaterial. Of course we do not know why or how it originated.