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Do qualia like love, fear, pain, and pleasure causally influence us? I think that the evolutionary argument that qualia must influence us is sufficiently clear and easy to understand that there should be very little room for disagreement on the matter. Evolution wouldn’t have built phenomenal world-simulations composed of qualia unless they increased our inclusive fitness in some way, because an increase in fitness is a logically necessary condition for evolution to select traits of any kind.
>> … Why does pain repel? Not for any mechanical reason, but instead because the raw feel of pain is intrinsically and irreducibly negative, and we (as receptive qualia systems) thus seek to avoid it.
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Consider the phenomenon of intense love. It’s a trope that love changes the raw qualitative feel of the world, oneself, music, one’s beloved, and a broad range of other things. Love is very selective in the things that it preserves and in the things that it changes. It wouldn’t change the physical orientation of buildings, their color, or their form, because all of these things have survival utility, and the utility function of love doesn’t seek its own extinction. Instead, love acts selectively on the aesthetic qualities that interpenetrate gestalts, such as cities, one’s self-model, one’s beloved, and music
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https://autonoetic.blogspot.com/2022/12/proto-intelligence-in-qualia-simple-case.html