Is there evidence of consciousness in a rock?
My hunch is: there’s a low-grade subjectivity/qualia to all of the universe, which would include the particles of the rock, but the rock would not experience an independent “rock-ness”.
The consciousness of organisms are perhaps more like a dissociative state, analogous to a gravity well of subjectivity, such that the qualia are concentrated inside a boundary (the entity that is intelligently chasing energy differentials), and excluding most information outside this boundary.
The primary reason for this hunch is that “ouch” is an experience, rather than merely a mathematical/algorithmic update to a neural net (compare with artificial NN’s, chemical feedback loops, etc). An “ouch” is not needed to strengthen the signal; just tilt the training feedback stronger as necessary (-10,000 points to “eat the berry that made us sick”). And it seems prohibitively expensive expensive to bootstrap “strange loop” subjectivity merely to strengthen those numbers via an “ouch”.
But instead, if some form of subjectivity were to pre-exist, Darwinian pressures would co-opt it as an efficient feedback loop mechanism, and then iterate until arriving at the “consciousness” of animals and humans (including an incentive to pay more attention to qualia in the organism boundary, and only minimally outside it)
I'd argue consciousness is a boring byproduct of evolution. You survive by predicting the actions of your competition. You predict your competition by introspecting yourself. Definitionally, consciousness.
If yes, one essentially lands in IIT [0] (according to some, implying that even a light switch has a 1-bit micro-consciousness).
If no, then one wonders what utility qualia brings to the table, compared to simply optimizing the algorithm to work without subjectivity. (Would ML training be more effective if we could somehow add "yuck" and "yum" experiences? How would we tell, assuming we aren't accidentally doing it already?)
For another perspective, Peter Watts' novel "Blindsight" explores the idea that consciousness is merely a temporary local optimum, and eventually selected against, in favor of life forms which are intelligent without being conscious.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory
Maybe Blindsight is right; maybe there's a future life that has no consciousness and thus is always maximally entropic.
Or maybe it's a zero-sum game of simultaneous moves between entropy and some other force, or spatially-separated moves such that relativity cannot order them, making nondeterminism the optimal strategy. But now I'm making stuff up.
Where I stumble, though, is identifying a way in which the Earth is actively chasing any sort of free energy differential, meaning no iterated selection pressures, and (probably) nothing we could call intelligence.
I believe this is the thrust of panpsychism/panentheism.