Consciousness

The biggest difference anywhere in the universe is between unconscious being and conscious beings. How did being become conscious and how widespread is consciousness?

In Poul Anderson's Technic History, there are many animals and intelligent beings on extra-solar planets and there are also some consciousness-level computers. In Anderson's Genesis, organic life is rare but post-organic intelligences spread throughout the galaxy and the Terrestrial intelligence, Gaia, "emulates" past human societies. "Emulation" is conscious simulation. Thus, within Gaia, entire populations of subsidiary subjects of consciousness believe that they are living on Earth in some earlier period. Processes within Gaia generate the same experiential and psychological effects as did human brains interacting with a natural and social environment. Can exactly the same experiences have completely different material bases?

This all raises the question: how did consciousness originate? We can turn from Poul Anderson's works to reading history, physics and philosophy. Philosophical literature shows us that there is as yet no answer to the question of the origin of consciousness. My best formulation is that naturally selected organismic sensitivity to environmental alterations quantitatively increased until it was qualitatively transformed into conscious sensation. Pleasure and pain have survival value and require consciousness. Therefore, as soon as sensitivity became conscious, consciousness was naturally selected. But intelligence can have aims other than mere survival.