Paper Discussion: Why is Anything Conscious?

Paper Discussion: "Why Is Anything Conscious?"
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14545v5
Abstract
We tackle the hard problem of consciousness taking the naturally selected,
embodied organism as our starting point. We provide a formalism describing
how biological systems self-organise to hierarchically interpret unlabelled sensory
information according to valence. Such interpretations imply behavioural policies
which are differentiated from each other only by the qualitative aspect of infor-
mation processing. Natural selection favours systems that intervene in the world
to achieve homeostatic and reproductive goals. Quality is a property arising in
such systems to link cause to affect to motivate interventions. This produces
interoceptive and exteroceptive classifiers and determines priorities. In formal-
ising the seminal distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness, we
claim that access consciousness at the human level requires the ability to hier-
archically model i) the self, ii) the world/others and iii) the self as modelled by
others, and that this requires phenomenal consciousness. Phenomenal without
access consciousness is likely common, but the reverse is implausible. To put it
provocatively: death grounds meaning, and Nature does not like zombies. We
then describe the multilayered architecture of self-organisation from rocks to Ein-
stein, illustrating how our argument applies. Our proposal lays the foundation of
a formal science of consciousness, closer to human fact than zombie fiction.