Evolution:The never-ending story

Originally posted by humy
how do you know that a bird is “conscious” of its selections?
We are “conscious” of our selections but we are a different species ( and with much greater intellect and larger brains ) but you cannot rationally extrapolate from that to conclude birds are “conscious” of their selections.

Even we aren't nearly always quite as much conscious of the motivations behind our choices as we would like to pretend. That's why spam still works, and late-night teleshopping channels.

Richard

Originally posted by humy
I don't have to think anything to have that sensation, just be consciously aware of what I 'see'.

And I say that being consciously aware isn't the be all and end all of feeling/sensation. I say it is a complicated set of things of which consciousness is just a part, and not necessarily a requirement.

Instead, without conscious awarness, you would, at best, have I kind of 'fake' fear where you merely behave exactly as if you had fear but have no actual feeling of fear. Why couldn't this be true for animals?
Not only do I disagree that consciousness is a requirement for 'true fear', but I disagree that we have any reason to believe animals do not have at least some sort of consciousness. I think the idea that we are conscious beings and all animals are robots is ridiculous and belied by the fact that we behave so similarly. If anything, your argument would lead to the conclusion that consciousness is a superfluous function that we could do without. And you also appear to claim that it is undetectable by any means other than personal experience.
If it behaves scared, it is scared - regardless of how it does it.

This is really quite a pointless discussion until there is a microscopic, empirical defition of what fear entails - because we do not understand the brain very well (of humans and other animals alike) there isn't much better that we can do to look at the symptoms of fear to determine whether it's "real" fear.