Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you on that point. It seems to me that people who read Blindsight and get all existential are not thinking things through all the way. Blindsight poses the question, in essence, "What if consciousness is a competitive dis advantage, in which case non-consciousness would be Better™?" I can't make a conclusive case one way or the other w/r/t the premise—it may perhaps be the case that consciousness is a co…
How do you know that values and judgements have anything to do with being conscious? A machine can act like it has values and judgements and we wouldn't attribute any consciousness to it. Or if you've seen a dog tear up a garbage can every time it's owner leaves, I wonder if you're watching an expression of dog values. Is the dog conscious?
The terms "value" and "judgement" have a broad semantic range. I mean to use them here in a sense that presupposes an exercise of subjective preference.
Machines, amoebas, programs, etc. can make choices, yes, and they can weigh alternatives, sometimes by assigning scores (aka "values") to differing outcomes. When I say that "Making value judgements is something that, by definition, conscious beings do and that non-conscious beings do not do," I'm trying to establish a narrower, more restricted definition than the broadest possible meaning of "value" or "judge."
So it's not that I "know" that values and judgements have anything to do with being conscious; I'm using these terms in such a way that by definition they do, because that's the set of things I want to talk about. The question then is not whether I'm right or wrong yet, but rather once we restrict the set of all things that could be called a "value" or a "judgement" to only the ones that I'm trying to make qualified assertions about, whether that set is empty (in which case everything I'm saying still evaluates to True, but vacuously and therefore uselessly so!).
I'm arguing this way because I think that narrower set a) exists and b) is relevant to the argument I'm making.
> Is the dog conscious?
I think dogs are unquestionably sentient (i.e. they are able to detect and respond to outside stimuli), and seem to display, in some minimal degree, at least an approximation of sapience (i.e. they are able to understand themselves and the world around them; hold and express preferences; form relationships and make decisions based on them).
I don't have a way to test whether a dog is conscious or not, and the dog has no means of trying to persuade me one way or the other; so I have to remain frustratingly agnostic on that point (frustrating to myself as much as I'm sure to you).