First published: January 6, 2023
Last revised: January 27, 2025

Why do we have a consciousness at all? This is a softer problem than to figure out the mechanism that instantiates consciousness, but by solving it we might get a better handle on the hard problem. A possible explanation is that the brain needs to be "used by itself" (as the late and great Daniel Dennett put it) so it conjures up a window into the real world and tells itself a story about the world, in the language of qualia.

But why would the brain need to go meta and "use itself", rather than just function directly without instantiating a mind? Perhaps the world in which we need to survive is so complex that the most efficient method may be to have an extremely high-level apparatus that can correlate perceptual stimuli with felt sensations and use it to pick actions.

This sounds like a good idea, but it still does not fully answer the question of why bothering with consciousness rather than performing the same processing of external stimuli, except without the feeling part. In other words, why aren't we all zombies, if it makes no difference and arguably it may even spare the extra resources that would be needed to run the mind?

When I ask myself this question I have to think about evolution and why it selected for conscious beings over non-conscious ones. Consciousness must confer some kind of advantage, but I don't know which one because I can conceive a brain that works like ours but without the inner light.