This is an old philosophical debate, why consciousness exists, what we gained with it, and what its evolutionary advantage is. Can a zomb...
This is an old philosophical debate, why consciousness exists, what we gained with it, and what its evolutionary advantage is. Can a zombie, a living creature, which is capable of doing everything without consciousness that we are capable of doing with consciousness, exist? Certainly not. Otherwise, consciousness would not have any evolutionary advantages and would've vanished a long time ago as an evolutionary dead end.
Then why does consciousness still exist? What makes us "more" with consciousness? There are animals which certainly don't have consciousness, an ant for example. Ant's cognitive knowledge is genetically determined. It is doing what it was programmed to do by genes and evolution. Its life is similar to a programmed machine. It has only unconditional reflexes and behaves according to those reflexes with very limited learning capabilities.
And what about the animals which certainly have learning capabilities but most likely don't have consciousness, some fish for example. Experiments demonstrated that there are fishes that can learn from experiences but without a cerebral cortex, a part of the brain which we think necessary to have consciousness. A fish capable of building conditional reflexes without consciousness is what we can assume a classical zombie could be capable of. But nothing more.
How a fish or a zombie is less than a human or a dog, which are certainly have consciousnesses? Consciousness makes these latter two capable of utilizing past experiences much more broadly than the conditional reflexes are capable of. As described in different thoughts, consciousness is living our past in our present. With consciousness we can even use our past experiences that are not connected to our currently felt experiences, to have and make decisions, and to live our subjective lives.
What have we gained with consciousness? With consciousness, we can utilize and use the broad range of our past experiences to solve problems more effectively than how we could without it, as a zombie could. The capabilities of adaptation to the environment are more flexible and can be much more successful with consciousness than it would be without it. And consciousness combined with a high capacity memory can make us capable to be a successful and effective thinker as well as to find out still unknown connections between things. And consciousness allowed us to find out what we did not know and allowed us to be capable of building a technical civilization.
How can we explicitly decide if a system has consciousness?
We can't easily decide because consciousness is an inside phenomenon of a system, not a specific function. But we can decide implicitly by examining the behavior of the system. If the behavior shows a kind of not random choosing between different options, or choosing differently in the same circumstances (because it has different inside states at different times), it may indicate consciousness. The richness and the flexibility of the behavior can be an indicator of consciousness. And a good indicator of consciousness would be the usage of flexible and effective learning capabilities as well.
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