ORIGINAL POST: https://www.facebook.com/groups/neoacademia/posts/10158921467338042/
ORIGINAL COMMENT:
Richard Dawkins says that Consciousness must have provided some sort of survival value or otherwise it wouldn't have evolved. He might be incorrect. Isn't there the possibility of it being a so called "evolutionary by-product"? Because I can't see any adaptive advantage provided by Consciousness.
TP:
Lets examine this against our own experience. We all know what it feels like to be groggy/sleepy in the morning. It would be fair to say that during these times, we are not operating at 100% consciousness. We are less intelligent, less aware, less reactive, less creative, less capable, less happy during these times. As consciousness increases, the different functions within our being become more aroused, more accurate, more functional, more beneficial.
What this means is that, based on our own experience, we have evidence that consciousness IS evolutionarily important - as better function requires better consciousness.
So the second question would be - why? Why does better consciousness give us better functionality. My bias is to believe that consciousness is the way different parts of the brain communicate with each other.
For example, with less consciousness (groggy/sleepy), the visual cortex and the planning cortex can't communicate with the motor cortex properly, so motor movements are less well-planned - resulting in tired sluggish behavior.
I am biased to think that as evolution occurred, multicellular life arose from single cellular life. The multicellular life was an aggregation of different unique lives. In order for one cell to control/coordinate with another cell, a system of punishments and rewards might have evolved. All of the cells work in harmony, and if they don't a punishment might take place. As life evolves upwards, these reward and punishment systems became pleasure and pain. If one part of the body harms another part of the body, the injured part triggers a pain response to punish the other cells for harming it.
The reason why computers don't have consciousness is because computers have designers. Different bits in a computer didn't need to evolve bottom-up emergent systems of cooperation based on rewards and punishments. Computer bits are programmed to cooperate with each-other through top-down design.