A digression: Consciousness. There is no Hard Problem, only woolly thinking.

[lproven]

I'd like to posit a progression of animal awareness. (In the full knowledge that there is no "tree" or "hierarchy" of evolution; the progression is merely a convenient way of presenting some data

Comments

[steer]

If you put a woodlouse in a T-shaped maze

Learning happens in much earlier and simpler animals than the woodlouse.

http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/Journals/cb/Volume/2007/3/worm_turned.asp

Nematode worms are not worms that you see in the garden they are microscopic.

C elegans is capable of learning but only has 302 neurons and a complete map is available.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caenorhabditis_elegans

By contrast athropods have 10^5 -- 10^6 neurons about a thousand times as many. I think c elegans is about as simple an animal that learned behaviour has been seen in.

chimps have been observed to lie... they also model the mental state of those othersModelling the mental state of others is known as "Theory of Mind" -- it is present in typical humans from relatively early child hood. There are experiments that distinguish this even in the pre

[lproven]

All points accepted, but this (which was a very old mailing-list post, sought & recycled) was aimed at a non-scientific audience & tried to use relatively familiar animals.

[steer]

And I guess the obvious next point is that most computational devices you own have more computational complexity and exhibit more "learning" than c elegans or a woodlouse.

And, of course, http://www.openworm.org/

[zotz]

I'm actually not sure what your point about qualia is. Presumably they exist at some increasing level of richness at all points on your scale, but I don't see what you're getting at by this.

[andrewducker]

"Where, in this model, do "qualia" occur?"

Surely that's the point. We can see why different animals would have different levels of complexity in their responses.

But no explanation of why that would require "feeling", or what we describe as "consciousness", rather than simple responsiveness, with no need for the creature to "feel" anything.