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#5695·Dennis Hackethal, 6 days agoA change in that inherited system may indeed have produced the qualitative leap to universal creativity. Since universality is necessarily all-or-nothing in the relevant sense, that leap is unsurprising. But it does not follow that every other aspect of mental life (including pain or other phenomenal experience) must have appeared in the same leap, or even require a comparable leap at all.
It’s a guess. No other explanation is known. If you have a different guess, propose it here.
Yes, it’s a guess. So the leap to universal creativity does not itself imply that phenomenal experience appeared in the same leap.
I proposed an alternative possibility (#5739): older, shared systems may already have supported phenomenal experience before universal creativity emerged. I’m not claiming that this alternative is established either.
I’m not sure “no other explanation is known” is quite right. For example, IIT offers a very different theory under which consciousness depends on a system’s intrinsic causal organization. My conjecture that phenomenal experience could predate universal creativity is at least compatible with that kind of account.
So it seems to me that we currently have competing conjectures here, rather than one known explanation and no alternative.