[ExI] There Is No ‘Hard Problem Of Consciousness’

[Kelly Anderson]

On Sat, May 9, 2026 at 1:23 PM John Clark via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> On Sat, May 9, 2026 at 12:00 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>> >> David Chalmers wanted to know why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all, but it seems to me that if Charles Darwin was right then there can be only one answer to that question, because consciousness is the inevitable byproduct of intelligence. That's because Natural Selection can't directly detect consciousness any better than we can detect it in other people, and nothing can select for something that it can't see. But Natural Selection CAN see intelligent behavior.
>>
>> > We've probably had this discussion before,
>
> Yep.

Not very long ago, I read:
The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes
by Donald Hoffman

It does a much better job IMHO of explaining qualia and the other
sorts of things that have been discussed for years on end here than we
have. I recommend it to anyone interested in the topic. Be warned
though that the author does go off the rails a bit at the end, and
REALLY goes off the rails when he does interviews on YouTube. So my
recommendation applies only to about the first 80% of the book. After
that... Thay're be Monstyrs.

-Kelly