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Watch a thought-provoking conference talk exploring why consciousness exists through a unified theoretical framework of lower and higher order consciousness. Delve into how natural selection drives organisms to learn causality not through presupposed objects, but through constructing objects based on affective responses. Discover how learning processes reduce raw sensory qualities to actionable policies that classify causes of affect, leading to increasingly complex orders of causal identity. Examine how these mechanisms enable crucial capabilities like reafference, self-awareness, and access-consciousness. Learn why unconscious "zombies" would be evolutionarily disadvantaged in their ability to learn cause-and-effect relationships and adapt. Understand how organisms develop first-order and second-order representations of self that enable phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness respectively. Follow the speaker's computational approach that addresses the hard problem of consciousness by grounding it in the fundamental evolutionary drive for survival.
