Evolution of Qualia

Until Darwin came along, we thought design only came from designers. No watch without watchmakers, no sculpture without sculptors, and no man without a God. Darwin showed us we didn't need a designer, we just needed a process: premature death of the least fit offspring repeated across generations.

Over millennia, and ever so slowly, design is conjured into existence. Microscopic bacteria from ancient swamps gradually give birth to cheetahs, the gazelles they're chasing, the vultures who're watching them, and the trees they're perched on.

How, you ask? Creatures come with blueprints called genes. They're tiny molecular chains that instruct how to create molecules called proteins. These proteins fold and coalesce together to form livers and bones and hairs and neurons. When a creature reproduces, the genes are copied and passed on to its progeny. The copying isn't perfect; most of the time it has little effect on the child, other times it causes the creature to die early, but ever so often it helps it survive better. You stack enough such mutations and the creature starts looking different. Eventually it is no longer the same species.

Repeat this enough and you go from single celled organisms to beaks on birds, fangs on tigers, brains in human beings, that, for the first time in four billion years, are able to comprehend this whole affair.

I say all of this only as context to the problem I'm really interested in: the design of minds.

Evolution by natural selection explains everything about a creature including the construction of its brain. There's no mystery why the eyes along with a visual cortex came to be. Discriminating between the different photons coming its way so as to detect shapes and colours, edges and depth, to escape a predator or catch a prey, is obviously good for the animal. Any mutation that clarified its vision would get passed down. The same applied for ears, nose, tongue, and all the other sense organs.

But what about the design of qualia itself?

Our mind — distinct from the brain — has rich structure. You can hear sounds, you see colours and shapes, you can smell, sense your entire body, feel pain and pleasure, you have thoughts, an internal monologue, an internal mind's eye where you can imagine more colours and shapes, emotions, intuitions, and a few other things.

We have this complex headset through which we perceive the world. Perhaps mine is different from yours; my red might be your blue and your red mine. Every species might have its own distinct headset that corresponds with its brain power. The headset design needs an explanation over and above the explanation for the brain functions it correlates with.

And it seems impossible. There are only two ways complex design appears in the universe: either it's authored by intelligent designers or it's the result of evolution by natural selection. We'll keep the God hypothesis aside for now. How would qualia have evolved? For that to happen you need a gene-equivalent for qualia that encodes qualia states, a process which constructs qualia from this substrate, and a way for this substrate to replicate.

None of this is a physical process, so we've veered outside of materialism. This substrate is then intrinsically connected to the actual gene that's getting mutated and replicated — the one which codes for the neurons that mirror these useful qualia states. Like a magic thread, if you will.

Obviously that's a load of bullshit and something's wrong here, but I can't put my finger on it. The whole problem seems hopelessly mysterious to me. Any guess on how to resolve it?