Raw LLM Responses

I don't think the author really understands what evolution is. First of all, he keeps referring to evolution as happening on the individual or organnismal level. It does not. Evolution happens at a population level. For this very reason, the argument he makes is inherently flawed. On the one hand, many evolutionary biologists agree, including myself, that consciousness could possibly be explained as a simple emergent phenomenon that comes from increasing brain complexity. However, the author is implying that the selective pressure is on consciousness itself rather than the actual neural networks that make up the brains of animals that exhibit it. In other words, there is a fitness advantage to reacting quickly to certain stimuli, making correct foraging decisions, having well timed and precise mating displays, making correct mate selection decisions, having efficient physiological systems, etc. These behaviors and processes are under the control of neuronal networks that are themselves under selective pressures, and when you smash enough of these networks into the same brain, an emergent phenomenon is generated which we call 'consciousness'. For this reason, I disagree with the author's entire idea as it is currently worded. I will go further and say that this can be a problem with philosophy in general, and armchair philosophy specifically. Any evolutionary biologist would immediately see the same problems as I do, and yet from reading the comments it seems most people are 100% on board with this idea, mostly due to a lack of scientific understanding. Philosophers have long speculated on the nature of consciousness and since the scientific revolution have always been one or two steps behind the people actually studying it.