A: Like all feelings, it was selected by evolution to signal an important situation and trigger appropriate behavior.
This is a design-stance explanation, which, firstly, is inherently problematic when applied to evolution (as opposed to a human designer), and, more importantly, doesn’t actually explain anything.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness is the problem of giving a functional (physical-stance, more or less—modulo the possibility of lossless abstraction away from “implementation details” of functional units) explanation of why we “feel conscious” (and just what exactly that alleged “feeling” consists of).
What’s more, even if we accept the rest of your (evolutionary) explanation, notice that it doesn’t actually answer the question, since everything you said about selection for certain functional properties, etc., would remain true even in the absence of phenomenal, a.k.a. subjective, consciousness (i.e., “what it is like to be” you).
You have, in short, managed to solve everything but the Hard Problem!
I worded poorly, but evolution does produce such apparent result.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Is way out my league, I did not pretend to solve it : “It’s a far cry from a proper explanation”.
But pondering it led to another find : “Feeling conscious” looks like an incentive to better model oneself, by thinking oneself special, as having something to preserve… which looks a lot like the soul.
A simple, plausible explanation that dissolves a mystery, works for me ! (until better is offered)
That line of thinking goes places, but here is not the place to develop it.
This is a design-stance explanation, which, firstly, is inherently problematic when applied to evolution (as opposed to a human designer), and, more importantly, doesn’t actually explain anything.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness is the problem of giving a functional (physical-stance, more or less—modulo the possibility of lossless abstraction away from “implementation details” of functional units) explanation of why we “feel conscious” (and just what exactly that alleged “feeling” consists of).
What’s more, even if we accept the rest of your (evolutionary) explanation, notice that it doesn’t actually answer the question, since everything you said about selection for certain functional properties, etc., would remain true even in the absence of phenomenal, a.k.a. subjective, consciousness (i.e., “what it is like to be” you).
You have, in short, managed to solve everything but the Hard Problem!
I worded poorly, but evolution does produce such apparent result.
Is way out my league, I did not pretend to solve it : “It’s a far cry from a proper explanation”.
But pondering it led to another find : “Feeling conscious” looks like an incentive to better model oneself, by thinking oneself special, as having something to preserve… which looks a lot like the soul.
A simple, plausible explanation that dissolves a mystery, works for me ! (until better is offered)
That line of thinking goes places, but here is not the place to develop it.