It’s really puzzling that evolution decided to manifest taste receptor signals as qualia. You can absolutely imagine a counterfactual human whose whole decision process about whether/what to eat is subconscious, and the human just gets a reward signal when it’s eating a good thing. Food selection seems like a very simple ML problem, simpler than e.g. metabolic regulation, that could have just been done by the unconscious brain.
It’s really puzzling that evolution decided to manifest taste receptor signals as qualia. You can absolutely imagine a counterfactual human whose whole decision process about whether/what to eat is subconscious, and the human just gets a reward signal when it’s eating a good thing. Food selection seems like a very simple ML problem, simpler than e.g. metabolic regulation, that could have just been done by the unconscious brain.