>But why does engaging with negative valence, planning, and weighing actions against other interests require subjective experience?
I have a few different answers here. None are rock solid. Lets take it as a given that planning requires a unified representation of all inputs to the planning apparatus. Now, going with the example from earlier: an organism touches a hot stove and recoils. We can imagine this behavior without any accompanying qualia. But to plan subsequent behavior around the hot stove, the damaging hotness must be represented in the unified representation in a way that intrinsically carries the semantics of negative valence. Phenomenal pain just is "semantics of negative valence featured in a unified representation". My claim is that this is a conceptual identity; you can't have one without the other. This gives the planning apparatus competence at engaging with signals of bodily damage.
Without intrinsic semantics/phenomenality all you have is a signal with no intrinsic meaning and some context to select behavior downstream of the signal. But planning in dynamic environments requires much more flexible signaling than this kind of static context can provide.
>AI systems weigh negative valence and execute long-term plans without any qualia.
AI systems are highly fragmented representations. It's why you can get them to contradict themselves in the same session, or even one sentence after another. They are not an exemplar of coherent behavior. There's also no negative valence in LLMs. At most they have a representation of good/bad and this spectrum influences the valence/quality/alignment in their behavior. But valence as such is external to the LLM.
>consider that there are many examples in which humans are able to perform very complex tasks in the absence of qualia. Consider, for instance, the phenomena of highway hypnosis, blindsight or sleepwalking - humans can do incredibly complicated things without qualia.
Complexity is relative. The complexity of tasks sans qualia are always starkly deficient compared to comparable tasks with qualia. A wide look at cognitive science demonstrates the inherent value of qualia to highly complex tasks or tasks executed over long timescales.
>This argument is circular. The original claim is that behaving coherently in a a complex environment requires consciousness. By shifting the goalposts...
The goalposts aren't shifted, I'm clarifying the target of the term behavior as there was clearly a disagreement in meaning.
>to say that only voluntary behaviors qualify, you are begging the question. The entire notion of "voluntary" implies conscious intent, so your argument has become "consciously willed behaviors require consciousness".
This misunderstands the debate. The philosophical issue of consciousness is how to explain consciousness given the in principle completeness of physical descriptions and their categorical distinction from phenomenal descriptions. In this context, voluntary behavior is just higher order/complex behavior, it is not taken as downstream of consciousness in principle. There is a parallel conversation in psychology/cognitive science where consciousness is largely understood as wakefulness, attention, reportability, intentionality, etc. In this context "consciousness" (in this restricted sense) is a pre-requisite of voluntary behavior. But that's neither here nor there with regards to the philosophical debate.