I believe in conscious causation. I think its function is to allow for higher level behaviour by making things matter to the subject or animal- consciousness makes consequences felt, experienced etc.
If you don't care, if things don't matter, things soon get bad. That, though, is a side issue.
So although it assists evolution, Ill argue its not physically explicable.
Now, the main theorem:
Without some influence of consciousness on events, we couldn't be talking about it. A purely non-conscious process wouldn't invent conversations and discourses about it, just as a purely "green process" wouldn't behave in a "reddish" way....
Get it?
As its reasonable to presume that higher animals are conscious, including humans, then because physical explanations (i.e. which stick to the "green machine" side of reality) are inadequate....
AND yet evolution is a physical oriented theory,
THEREFORE its valid to conclude evolution is not sufficient - i.e. its always going to be an inadequate or incomplete account of higher animal behaviour.
This is pretty much the argument made by philosopher
Thomas Nagel in his book '
Mind and Cosmos' - he gives a brief summary
here. There have been a number of critical reviews (
Sean Carroll's blog links to some) which may be of interest.
The main problem I have with this idea is that it's basic premise (physical explanations are inadequate) is weak - our current physical explanations are
incomplete; whether we can get what might be considered a complete physical explanation remains to be seen - this is common to other physical fields of study; but in the case of consciousness, it's hard to say what would be a complete physical explanation because of the issue of subjectivity (see below).
It seems to me that the available evidence suggests that consciousness evolved as a means of facilitating dynamic, flexible behaviour, involving theory of mind, modelling self and others, and modelling future 'what-if' scenarios, i.e. planning. The way the various processes and models interact appears to produce a sense of subjective experience. It's not clear precisely how this happens, but we know many different ways to distort subjective experience and modify its intensity by disrupting the activity of specific areas of the brain, just as unconscious brain processes can be modified and distorted by disrupting their activity.
In other words, consciousness appears to be what happens when certain brain processes are active in particular ways. The complication with explaining this is that descriptions are necessarily objective (referential, linguistic), whereas conscious experience is necessarily subjective (experiential, phenomenal), so no matter how detailed the physical description, it will always involve
correlations with reported experience.
As Wittgenstein observed, there is no private language; we can only communicate our experience via metaphor and simile, appeals to shared objective events and the hope that our experience of what they are
like is similar to other people's (we also know this isn't always true). This is why one of the best definitions of consciousness is Nagel's: that there is
something it is like to be a particular creature.
The simplest explanation of how consciousness can influence material events is that it is what the neurological evidence suggests, a particular subset of brain processes. It seems to me that the reification of consciousness is unjustified; dualist models are no more explanatory, and raise far more metaphysical and ontological questions than they purport to answer.
Panpsychist models such as
Philip Goff's seems to avoid the need for functional explanation by making consciousness fundamental, but run into explanatory problems such as how, and what it could mean for, an electron to have a tiny amount of consciousness, how collections of fundamental elements of consciousness make large-scale consciousness in animals with brains, but apparently not elsewhere, and so-on.
