That is absolutely brilliant! Not knowing the what and how of consciousness, you simply assume it, rename the assumption, and then use that newly minted “autonomous adaptive Intelligence” to show what consciousness is and how it arises!!! Bloody hell! Who wouda thunk it was so easy?!?
But let’s go back for a brief boring moment to the facts and check the assumptions:
Fact 1: You do not know what consciousness is, nor how it arises.
Assumption 1: “How it arises” assumes, of course, that it must 'arise' from a material substrate, and that must be assumed as a given, or you’ll get kicked out of academia on your ass.
Fact 2: We have technology! that shows us neurological (actually cellular metabolic) correlative activity in the brain — AND THEY ARE PROOF!!!
Assumption 2: So, although we know nothing about the what and how of consciousness, we know with 150% certainty that it arises in the fully developed human brain (and perhaps a little earlier in other select ancestral species) strictly from material causes, because we have those neurological correlates AND THEY ARE PROOF!!!
Fact 3: — Correlation is not causation. Neural correlates are not evidence of consciousness, even though they may be evidence of conscious activity.
Assumption 3: Correlation is causation! 😉
Fact 4: Sentience has to come first, otherwise it is unexplainable.
Assumption 4: Using all the tools of neuroscience will explain it. So neuroscientists can claim that the neurological correlates of consciousness are all the proof that is needed, because they know sentience has to arise from matter!
But let’s back-up a little (not that you’ve actually noticeably advanced at all).
Why does sentience have to come first? Because what that word points to — the understanding of this phenomenon called sentience — always already assumes itself.
You can say it arose from an infinite number of random mutations over an infinite amount of time, but that will never be an explanation. It will, again, be just an explaining away of the problem.
It doesn’t even explain why the mutation hangs around, if it arose from random mutations, which the very next moment might randomly mutate away, and over very long periods of time should have completely been wiped away.
Because, before sentience, no perceptual mutation — like a light-sensing cell 🤣 — could provide a benefit that would lead to better survivability. There is no selectivity for such an unknown. A light-sensing cell, without sentience, would be indistinguishable from any other cell — and provide no additional benefit beyond that of the other cells.
You can even argue that the light-sensing cell was ‘frozen in time’ until sentience arose to use it. But that undermines your first assumption about material causation because it asserts that over very long periods of time nothing might happen at all!
Ultimately, you might be tempted to say that they both arose together… but correlation is not causation.
Yet it doesn’t rule it out. So, you would have to discover some event, process, or magical dual-natured particle that hit in just the right way, in just the right moment, that imparted perception and sentience to a cell. A happy coincidence perhaps, but one that would needfully be replicated frequently enough to account for the infinite range of sentience found all over this tiny stone we live on. Good luck with that. Perhaps a ‘GodHead’ particle?!?
One day perhaps, you, your readers, or some other neuroscientist(s), might finally accept that whatever sentience is, it must be primordial. That will be a big day in modern scientific practice.
Unfortunately, you will have wasted lifetimes because of erroneous assumptions. And still be thousands of years behind other scientists — not modern ones crippled by these bad assumptions about what sentience must be and how it arises — who saw the handwriting on the wall.
And just to drill home the point: “autonomous adaptive Intelligence” assumes consciousness. That's the whole error. Without sentience, intelligence isn't possible. Unless, that is, you downgrade the meaning of the word to 'having processed data?. Yeah, then even a thermometer is intelligent. Well done!!
"Hey Thermo! What's
the temperature outside? (pause) oh yeah.
I have to look…. Hey! Cool! The
thermometer says it's a balmy 105
degrees today. Excellent!
Thanks Thermo!”
“So cool! AI (autonomous intelligence) has come so far!"
Fact 5: Intelligence cannot be the source of sentience, because it requires it.
Even when we speak of the other AI, the assertion that intelligence supposedly ‘emerges’ from the software models ignores the intelligence of the sentient beings who design and feed the models. I purposely left "learning" off there. They aren't 'models that learn'. What they do is process data according to instructions encoded by the software engineers who programmed the models that run on the hardware designed by other sentient beings who engineered the hardware, including the unchangeable, inextensible hardware instruction set that defines the complete capability repertoire of that hardware that is encoded in the silicon, and which ultimately is where the sentience would have to arise if it has to arise from material causes. Otherwise, it's just a 'mechanical turk' (no not Amazon's — way before that).
When we take the larger problem of “autonomous intelligence” there are no sentient programmers, nor sentient engineers (or is this a book about Intelligent Design?!?) and thus sentience MUST BE PRIMORDIAL. (Sorry for yelling 🤭)
