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Consciousness is Nature’s Warning that Living Things are Insurgents
The uncanny valley and why we’re not all zombies
Does consciousness serve some special purpose, or could any conceivable effect be achieved unconsciously, as in robotically, by physical or other insentient processes?
This sort of question often arises to challenge naturalistic explanations of consciousness.
For instance, if consciousness — the subjective undergoing of a mental state like what it’s like to feel hungry or see a summer day — is supposed to be a way of integrating information, couldn’t a computer efficiently process data without being aware it’s doing so?
Or if consciousness is supposed to help determine what’s relevant to an organism’s survival, couldn’t this, too, be done by causes that strictly determine their results, with no autonomous veto power for a ghostly mind that seems to inhabit the body? A warning might flash in the brain, and that flash might force an animal to retreat even if the animal isn’t aware of what’s happening. The animal would be a zombie or a robot.
In short, why aren’t we all just zombies or robots? Indeed, does philosophical naturalism entail that we’re zombies, so that consciousness must be unreal, despite appearances?
