this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2026
20 points (95.5% liked)
Asklemmy
55349 readers
105 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Personally I think you're deep into logical fallacy territory. Evolutionary side effect vs. major advantage -- these aren't mutually exclusive things. And the second question makes even less sense, to be honest. Are you high?
Having said that, sentience is an emergent property of our complicated biology, and from that perspective and trying to tie this back to your question, it is kind of like a side effect of our brain structure and biochemical processes. But like all "side effects" that persist in populations through time, it almost certainly has evolutionary advantages for sentient species, or at least, it did at one time. Evolution itself is not a omniscient, self-deterministic, or static process, though.
As for correcting errors in vision, it's possible. But it's incredibly unlikely that's the only advantage consciousness and/or sentience provides. Blind people are also able to process and filter complicated sensory information in order to perform substantially complex behaviors. And, conversely, organisms we consider non-sentient are capable of performing some very sophisticated behaviors, presumably completely by instinct.
It is very undialectical framing but there is a charlimit in title. I almost started yammering about crows using tools but also just enjoying pranks and experimenting with their environment. I think saying stuff like consciousness is just slowing us down is reducing it to its drawbacks.
Yes of course I'm stoned. I'm doing the laundry on a Saturday evening, I have no plans. Here, let me rephrase the title: how much do you hate Richard Dawkins?