The purpose of consciousness

If all behaviour of humans and other creatures can be explained and modelled purely in terms of brain function with no necessity to refer to consciousness, the what purpose does it serve? It it serves no purpose at all, or has no causal power, then why is it there? If we subscribe to the idea that life as we know it today is purely formed by mutation and natural selection, then it would follow that there must be a survival value to consciousness otherwise it would not have been selected for. There is, of course, another possibility that in an infinite Universe anything, no matter how improbably, will happen and that could include the appearance of consciousness even it it had no advantage. However that would be a possibility to consider when all else had failed.

Different workers ascribe different effects to consciousness but it is difficult to see why they do so. For instance Gray in his book [Gray 2004] devotes a chapter to a survival value for consciousness. His stated desire to do so stands on wanting to fit consciousness into a Darwinian model which he takes as an unquestioned starting point[Gray 2004, page 90]. In that chapter he outlines the idea of “late-error detection” in which discrepancies between the unconscious responses to the environment and what is the ideal response are flagged up to consciousness in order for a higher level correction to be made. However, it is not clear why consciousness as such need be involved in this. Higher level, unconscious processing, would surely be able to achieve the same result. The complete model fits in with the auto-pilot idea but gives it no justification.