MT Bennet et al - Why is Anything Conscious?

For this session we'll be reading Michael T. Bennett's provocative pre-print "Why Is Anything Conscious?"

In this paper, Bennett takes on the Hard Problem of consciousness by offering a formal account of how biological systems self-organize to hierarchically interpret sensory information according to valence (what's good or bad for the organism). He uses this formalism to argue, from first principles, that access (functional) consciousness depends on phenomenal consciousness — that the phenomenal is intrinsically functional, rather than separable from it — and therefore that philosophical zombies (beings that act exactly like humans, but lack phenomenal consciousness) are impossible. Along the way he develops a hierarchy of being, from inert objects through learning systems to first-, second-, and third-order selves.

You can find the paper here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14545. For this discussion we will be covering pages 1-25; you *do not* need to read the proofs from page 32 on.