The origin of consciousness was a world-defining event, comparable only with the origin of life itself. But the moment that consciousness emerged is buried deep in the evolutionary record and is hard to identify.
In this article, Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka put forward their new theory about how and when consciousness evolved. They identify a unique marker of minimal consciousness that they believe drove the Cambrian explosion of biodiversity and answers the age-old question of which organisms are conscious.
MuZero is an algorithm with a superhuman ability to learn: it has learned to play 57 different Atari video games as well as Chess, Go and Shogi, and defeated the greatest human masters in every one of them. Yet, this amazing algorithm and the computer in which it is implemented are as conscious as your washing machine. Its “intelligence”, manifest in its learning ability, has nothing to do with consciousness – the ability to feel, perceive and think in the deeply subjective sense that we cherish. If you were told that you would become deprived of all subjective perceptions and feelings, you would be devastated and consider such a life to be meaningless. Intelligence – having the ability to learn and solve complex problems like MuZero does – and consciousness – being the subject of experience – seem to be unrelated.
But are intelligence and consciousness really unrelated? Most people have the strong intuition that clever animals like chimpanzees, dolphins, elephants and dogs are conscious, whereas they are less sure about animals like sea anemones, worms and slugs that show only very simple forms of learning.
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Consciousness Cannot Have Evolved
By Bernardo Kastrup
In the 19th century George John Romanes, an ardent follower of Charles Darwin, articulated this intuition. He interpreted animal psychology within the Darwinian evolutionary framework and defined mind (which he and others of his time used as a synonym for consciousness) in terms of the ability to make learning-based choices:
“The criterion of mind, therefore, which I propose, […] is as follows: – Does the organism learn to make new adjustments, or to modify old ones, in accordance with the results of its own individual experience?” (Romanes 1883).
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