You're talking about a different sense of the word "conscious." What you're describing might better be called "reactivity" or something. (Don't get too hung up on the specific word; the point is there are several different meanings of the word "conscious" and the distinctions are critical.) There is no obvious reason why useful interaction with one's environment requires conscious experience, which is the phenomenon we're discussing here.

“ It is possible to be conscious because otherwise your body wouldn't be able to survive.”

False, we can program a roomba to seek out electricity to ‘survive’. E.g. zombies

You don't think it's possible to seek nutrients without having experiences?

I don't believe it is. This is the problem w/ the philosophical zombies, they are self defeating examples and can't exist in anything but a thought experiment. The fact that you're seeking nutrients at all means you can distinguish between sensory input, and therefore are experiencing something. If you can't distinguish between sensory input, then you are not experiencing anything. How can you be an effective seeker of nutrients if you don't experience anything and get feedback on whether you've found the nutrient or not?

This is why I think the hard problem of consciousness is silly and only exists because language is so imperfect that philosophers have invented a problem which they can't even decide is actually a problem or not. Can any of us even agree on what an "experience" is?

You can tell this is so because every conversation about the hard problem of consciousness starts off by trying to convince people there is a problem to talk about and use the same tired examples. We can "experience" red. There is an "experience" of being a bat.

There sure seems to be a distinction between having sensory input and being able to reflect on that experience. How else could you explain the phenomenon of blindsight?

I agree philosophical zombies are impossible, but only because they wouldn't be able to reliably talk about consciousness without a conscious "zombie master". See https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/zombies-sequence

> you can distinguish between sensory input, and therefore are experiencing something

You are assuming “you” is a unique, atomic thing here.

When your fingers curl due to being immersed in water (which is a neurological thing, not a physical thing!), your conscious mind does not experience the humidity, the finger curling system does. You just experience the effect of the skin curling through sight and touch, afterwards.

There are several other systems in our body that react to an environment that we are barely conscious of, and “barely” is being generous. Those seems like a counterexample of your “we can't not be conscious if we experience”.

Yes but see, in your example, I would then say your fingers are conscious, too. Or that there is an experience of being a finger. Who, besides the finger, could say otherwise? Just because you've moved the experience from me having it, to the finger having it, doesn't mean that the experience disappeared.

The problem is yet again w/ the definition of having an experience, as I said in my reply to the parent. It's just language, and the reason why we find ourselves in some kind of linguistic paradox trying to explain it.

It's not just language. I doubt that you think it is like anything to be a rock. You do think that it is like something to be a person (or even a finger)! Those are two different states of existence, one with experiences/qualia (i.e. it is like something to be that thing) and one without. How do we explain the difference.

ps. interesting user name.

How can you be so sure there is no experience of being a rock? Surely it's wildly different from being a finger or a person, and perhaps, very boring from a human's perspective. I'm not sure why everybody insists you can have qualia or you can't, as if it's a binary thing. Perhaps it's a gradient. I would say there is something like being a plant, or something like being a computer program. Just because we are unable to imagine it as humans does not mean that it doesn't exist.

What makes my experience of seeing red any more special than the experience of a plant reacting to light? The fact that I can type about it on hackernews and the plant can't?

Well, I'm not totally convinced it's not like anything to be a rock. But this is the generally widely-used object of "an object without qualia".

You are apparently a believer in some degree of panpyschism. That's fine. Conscious is like gravity - it's just a part of the universe and there's no explanation for it other than that it is experienced by anything with (mass, for gravity ; ??? for consciousness).

I'm not opposed to this explanation, I'm just not (yet) convinced that it's the right one.

The minerals in rocks can change in response to their environment. There has to be something that it feels like for that change to happen.

There are chemical reactions that follow gradients in chemical potential to self sustain and survive from our standpoint. Not sure one would argue that the chemical reaction has consciousness.

If I have a material that tightens or loosens based on temperature or chemical gradient, does that count as "sensory input"? I wouldn't say so, since nothing is receiving a signal from it to distinguish, and I also wouldn't say it's causing experiences, but it is enough to seek nutrients for a bacteria or a jellyfish-like creature.

You're right, a bacteria would sense and follow chemical gradients and light. And that would be a primitive form of consciousness.

A piece of material is not conscious because it doesn't need to. You see, bacterias are self replicators, humans too. And self replication is resource intensive, while resources are limited. So life becomes a competition. That is why agents need to become more attuned to their state and possible actions and outcomes.

Is that good enough to be called consciousness? Taking sensory inputs, representing your state, taking actions, observing effect, learning from it. Your goal - to exist, to make copies of yourself. If you're not aware of essential information, or don't understand your situation, you die. If you live, it's because you are aware.

If it's only one protein, is that protein primitively conscious?

It's not interacting with anything else to make those decisions, it's completely autonomous.

> observing effect, learning from it

If something is meaningfully doing that, then we're getting to consciousness. But I'll note that I don't count natural selection as "learning" here.

And observing the results of decisions and learning is not mandatory to survive and reproduce.

Natural selection is the outer loop, reinforcement learning the inner loop. Agents, by living or dying, send signals into the system, guiding the process.

Natural selection is not conscious, and agents don't need to have reinforcement.

"consciousness" as a philosophical question is not about the ability to detect state in the world (including your own state) and reacting to it. it is not about self-replication.

It is about having subjective experience aka "qualia". It is about "it being like something to be you", contrasted with, e.g. being a rock (which most people agree, it is not like anything to be).

This is an argument that an amobea must be concious, no?

Any self replicator can be. I am not sure about non-replicating agents like some AIs.

Besides having a way to copy what it learns into the future, self replication also provides a goal, a guiding force - of course, the goal is to avoid death before replication. Another great quality of self replication is its open-endedness. It can become anything as long as it keeps replicating.

For these three qualities I consider self replication the basic process behind consciousness. They create the means by which open ended learning can evolve.

Prions self-replicate. Are they concious?