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Don Geddis's avatar

The "principle" is that consciousness plays a role in determining behavioral choices. It is not the case that it does "not further participate in causing any other event at all". That is incorrect. Consciousness does cause other events. But that doesn't mean it is somehow outside of physics. It's just at a different level of description, much like how you can talk about hurricanes without getting outside gas molecules and fluid flow. They are higher level, abstract patterns running on the substrate of the underlying implementation.

Consciousness is an algorithm, and that algorithm adds value to the animal that has it. You cannot get as successful behavior without it. That's why it evolves naturally.

(You might want to look up Compatibilism. Deterministics chess-playing programs have "free will" also.)

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

re epiphenomenalism, I agree with you. I’m not convinced that it is even a physically coherent concept. How could a physical event or process be caused but not further participate in causing any other event at all? It would seem to fly in the face of numerous conservation principles of physics.

I’m not clear on what principle we could expect all naturally evolved intelligent systems to necessarily feature consciousness. On the other hand who knows what features might exist in alien intelligences, as inconceivable to us as our subjectivity might be to them.

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