First published: January 6, 2023
Last revised: April 16, 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 reality and tells itself a story about it 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? One explanation could be that the world in which we need to continue existing is so complex that an efficient survival mechanism may be to have a high-level apparatus that can correlate perceptual stimuli with felt sensations to then produce actions.

This sounds like a good idea, but it still does not 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 it may even spare the extra resources that would be needed to run the mind?

This leads me to think about evolution and why it selected for conscious beings over non-conscious ones. Consciousness then 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.