You're wrong. I mean awareness. That may entail self-awareness, but it doesn't necessarily entail this.
Ok, I think you mean something similar to me when I say experience. This is the wiki definition which I think is pretty close to how I'm using it: "
Awareness is the ability to perceive, to feel, or to be
conscious of events,
objects, thoughts, emotions, or sensory
patterns"
I believe that there are life forms other than human beings that experience subjective awareness.
Right and to different extents. But the point I was trying to get at is whether you would also say there are also life forms that have information processing systems without awareness.
Unless all carbon-based information processing systems generate consciousness, then why is it that some carbon-based information processing systems generate consciousness while others do not?
Because some evolved in that direction while others didn't. We can ask the same question about any selected trait, right? Why did one species select in direction A, while some other species selected in direction B?
To say that consciousness provides a selection advantage is not to say that other characteristics don't also provide selection advantages. Every species that currently exists has adapted to its environment in a manner that permits enough members of it to pass their genes on. If the environment changes and they don't adapt they may become extinct.
Without awareness, there is no experience.
Yes, I think we're meaning approximately the same thing here.
So, why do some carbon-based information processing systems generate subjective experience (awareness) while others do not?
Well, that's something researchers are currently working on! I don't think anyone has solved this yet. From what I've seen the IIT (integrated information theory) folks seem to be making some progress and I'm somewhat partial to what I've been seeing coming out of that camp, though I think it's still too early to tell. Other researchers such as Penrose are persuing microtubules as playing a key role but their stuff is too technical for me to be sure. I'm content for now to sit back and see what guys like these are able to come up with!
But regardless of the actual mechanism, I don't think its correct to say that because this mechanism produces awareness and provides a selection advantage that one would expect every species to proceed that way - which again, please correct me if I'm wrong, seems to be what you're suggesting?
Wrong! That an information processing system happens to experience subjective awareness is completely irrelevant as to the information processing actually taking place. That's why consciousness, on the materialist view, is considered to be an epiphenomenon (a causally inert by-product).
Like I said, I can't speak for how others consider conscious process, this is how I see it. Why is it irrelevant?
When you touch a hot stove you will instinctively, without awareness pull your hand back. Some life forms might only be able to do that. The pain provides information that causes it to move away from the source of pain but the information may not affect future actions. Species with conscious processes of awareness and deliberation can make greater use of the information, in terms of current actions as well as drawing on the experience in future actions.
The view I'm currently leaning to is that conscious processes are not in addition to information processing, but are a type of information processing. They play their part in the causal chain along with everything else in this vast web of causes and effects (with perhaps some randomness thrown in).
Whether you technically call that epiphenomenal or not I don't know. I've seen this term used in all sorts of ways on the forums, to different effects, that I find it - at least for me - impedes clear communication rather than promotes it. So I try and avoid it entirely, just describing how I view things!