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I’m not sure which part of my subjective experience is that-thing-commonly-called-consciousness (the word is used for too many things, from being awake to being a person), but I doubt all elements of it came from one single evolution development. Pain and pleasure responses are probably ancient, likewise fight/flee/feed/reproduce reflexes; introspective imagination of what we look like to other people probably evolved when our earliest ancestors became social creatures, and probably also exists in other species’ minds today — even in humans it’s only a partial awareness, we’re good with images but we don’t really know how we sound (literally or metaphorically) which implies it didn’t perfectly fit out development of complex language.*

If it was as simple as food/water/shelter, the Norns from the video game Creatures would be conscious.

* I don’t mean trivial errors like garden path sentences or Mondegreens, I mean e.g. the catastrophic communication failure between what (Brexit) Leavers want and the arguments used by Remain, and vice-versa.




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