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RE: Why I am Optimistic About the Science of Consciousness (Contra @rachelsmantra)

Well the intentions are good, and surely we all share them (we all want to understand what consciousness is), but your post is just stating that we should do something, and I personally would have liked it more if it delved deeper into what we could do.

I'm with Dawking on this one, in that I think consciousness is the number one mystery right now.

Personally, what I don't get, is why it exists at all. So let's take natural selection. Amoebas and bacteria don't have consciousness (we think!). At what point during evolution did Ms. Natural Selection go "I can't do this, I'm working 24/7, I hardy get any sleep, I can't do all this purely mechanically - I must enlist the help of Consciousness!". What I'm saying is, a robot could do everything I'm doing, without all this subjectivity - all this qualia. A car goes out of petrol, but it doesn't feel the pangs of hunger that I do. I hit my leg on some piece of furniture - but why does it have to hurt. I just don't get it: why aren't we all just unfeeling machines? What is it a machine with a soul can do that a machine without a soul can't?

In some sense pampsychism is attractive, precisely because if everything is conscious to some degree, then consciousness is not as unfathomable.