Yes — I think your distinction is important, and I would revise what I said earlier. I collapsed responsiveness, sensation, and intelligence into one evolutionary continuum when they are better treated as different things.
The hot-stove example is especially good because it exposes something that happens inside us:
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Reflex: receptors detect damaging heat → spinal circuitry withdraws the hand. This can happen before conscious awareness.
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Sensation: the information reaches whatever neural machinery produces the felt experience of “hot!” or pain. That is something quite different from merely executing the withdrawal.
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Intelligence/learning: you subsequently know that the stove is hot, can remember it, predict consequences, deliberately avoid it, and perhaps tell somebody else.
Those three capacities can be separated.
And your gecko makes the point nicely. The feather touches it and — whoosh — it is gone. There is no reason to assume that the gecko first has a little conscious thought saying “Something is touching my skin; I shall now flee.” A highly effective sensorimotor circuit can accomplish the whole thing extremely rapidly.
But that doesn't settle whether there was any experience whatsoever accompanying the stimulus. That's the difficult philosophical boundary you're getting at.
The thermostat analogy is useful, with one qualification
A thermostat is responsive but we have no particular reason to attribute sensation to it. Temperature crosses a threshold, a circuit changes state, and the furnace switches.
An animal's withdrawal reflex can be enormously more complicated than that — thousands or millions of neurons, chemical modulation, competing reflexes, sensory filtering, etc. — while still being essentially information → appropriate action, without requiring a conscious experience at every stage.
So complexity by itself doesn't establish sentience.
And evolution gives us a plausible reason for eventually adding something else. Once an organism has a sufficiently rich internal representation of what's happening to it, having that information available as an integrated experience can make it useful for more than one immediate response.
Pain is a particularly obvious example. A simple withdrawal mechanism says:
Hot → withdraw.
A more sophisticated organism can have something more like:
This particular thing hurts me → remember where it happened → alter my future behavior → investigate what caused it → perhaps avoid similar circumstances.
That makes sensation potentially useful as a general-purpose learning and behavioral-control mechanism, rather than merely another reflex.
And I particularly like your "pre-evolves" point
I wouldn't say that natural selection necessarily selected for consciousness itself at first. It could select for increasingly elaborate systems of:
sensation → internal representation → learning → prediction → flexible behavior.
At some point, perhaps somewhere in that continuum, there is what we would call experiencing.
And then intelligence can come considerably later.
That gives us an interesting three-dimensional evolutionary picture rather than the simple ladder I gave you before:
reactivity → sensation → learning/flexible behavior → intelligence
with substantial overlap and no sharp boundaries necessarily visible from the outside.
The really fascinating question is therefore not “Is the gecko intelligent?” but “At what point does information processing become something that is experienced?”
And I think your original interest in being sensate is actually aimed at that deeper question. Intelligence is almost beside the point. A creature could conceivably be very unintelligent but have experiences, while an arbitrarily elaborate information-processing machine might be intelligent in some functional sense without there being anything it is like to be that machine.
That's a much more interesting distinction than simply putting bacteria, geckos, humans, and computers on an intelligence scale.
Yes. And I think that is exactly why it is useful to keep reflex and sensation conceptually separate.
If we say, “The gecko responds to the feather, therefore it experiences the feather,” we've quietly made the step that panpsychism needs: causal responsiveness implies some degree of experience. Push that principle far enough and the thermostat, a photodiode, or even a molecule begins to acquire a tiny interior point of view.
I don't see any necessity for that.
A reflex can be understood entirely in functional terms:
stimulus → neural processing → motor response
without inserting:
stimulus → experience → motor response.
Indeed, your hot-stove example gives us direct evidence that those processes can be separated within a conscious organism. Your hand can withdraw before you consciously experience the pain. So the existence of the later sensation doesn't establish that the earlier reflex was itself a primitive sensation.
That gives us a much more modest evolutionary hypothesis:
Reflexes are ancient mechanisms for keeping an organism alive. Sensation is a later development that makes information available in a different, more flexible way.
And that doesn't require saying that the earlier mechanism possessed some dim precursor of consciousness.
The interesting philosophical problem then moves to why sensation appeared at all. Natural selection can readily explain why increasingly sophisticated information processing and learning are advantageous. What it doesn't straightforwardly explain is why some of that processing should be felt.
That's the hard problem, and I think your distinction actually makes it harder in an interesting way: we can't dissolve consciousness simply by pointing to increasingly complicated reflexes. Somewhere between “the organism reacts” and “the organism experiences” there appears to be a genuine additional phenomenon.
Exactly. And that's a nice Darwinian way of putting it: natural selection doesn't need to understand a mechanism in order to exploit it.
Evolution doesn't have to answer the question “Why does this processing produce an experience?” It only needs a variant in which whatever machinery produces experience happens to improve survival or reproduction. If it does, that variant leaves more descendants, and the machinery gets retained.
In that sense, consciousness could be something evolution discovered rather than designed.
There is an amusing asymmetry here. We humans are then in the peculiar position of having inherited a mechanism that natural selection had been using successfully for a very long time without knowing what it was doing, and then eventually one of its products became capable of asking what the mechanism was doing.
Natural selection itself doesn't care whether the organism understands pain. It cares whether the organism behaves differently because of what happened.
And perhaps that is why your distinction between reflex and sensation matters so much. The evolutionary innovation needn't have been “make the reflex conscious.” It may have been something more like:
Make the organism's condition available to the organism as experience, and suddenly the same information can influence a much wider range of future behavior.
Evolution doesn't need to know why that works. If it works, it keeps it.
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