To answer the question I will borrow a quote from neuroscientist and Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman:
The evolutionary advantage is quite clear. Consciousness allows you the capacity to plan. Let's take a lioness ready to attack an antelope. She crouches down. She sees the prey. She's forming an image of the size of the prey and its speed, and of course, she's planning a jump. Now suppose I have two animals: one like our lioness, has that thing we call consciousness; the other only gets the signals. It's just about dusk, and all of a sudden the wind shifts and there's a whooshing sound of the sort a tiger might make when moving through the green grass, and the conscious animal runs like hell but the other one doesn't. Well, guess why? Because the animal that's conscious has integrated the image of a tiger. The ability to consider alternative images in an explicit way is definitely evolutionarily advantageous.
This confuses planning with consciousness. When Deep Blue beats Kasparov at Chess, it is planning but it is not conscious.
ReplyDeleteI have to agree with Random Stuff's comment. Further, there is growing evidence (using EEG and, more recently, fMRI) that decisions are made unconsciously, long before they are acknowledged consciously. See this New Scientist article for some fairly recent research.
ReplyDeleteThe thing is, at the moment, no one really knows what consciousness is, or what it does. A speaker at last year's British Psychological Society annual conference argued that it is merely part of the perceptual process, and that its supposed control over decision-making is entirely illusory.
Whatever the truth, it seems impossible to speculate meaningfully on the evolutionary advantage of consciousness (or, for that matter, on whether it could still exist if the brain were simulated in different substrates) until such time as we have a better idea of what it actually does.
Have you read Peter Watts' "Blindsight"? It's a feast of a novel.
ReplyDelete@Mac I have not, but I'll be sure to look that up.
ReplyDeleteWatts has made the book available for free online in various formats: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
ReplyDelete