Consciousness is sometimes regarded as intrinsically mysterious - something probably beyond human comprehension, maybe even impossible to define. On the other hand consciousness is an ordinary fact of life - babies are born without it and develop it over the first few years of life. And whatever it is, it presumably evolved - like other complex biological phenomena. Even if we regard consciousness as a curse, then that makes it even more plausible that it has a biological benefit to counterbalance its obvious disadvantages - or else natural selection would have gotten rid of it long ago (saving a lot of hungry brain tissue in the process). We experience the dawn of consciousness every morning when we awaken.
People often find 'consciousness' mysterious, but the real mystery is awareness - and many other animals are aware, so this is not a specifically human mystery.
The proper questions should be as follows. Firstly, is awareness an evolved adaptation? In other words did awareness evolve to solve a problem with reproductive consequences for the animal, or is awareness it perhaps an epiphenomenon? And if we assume that awareness is an adaptation with a biologically useful function, the second question concerns the biological nature of this adaptation - what is the mechanism by which awareness solves the problem it evolved to solve?
So consciousness cannot be any more biologically mysterious than any of the other extremely hard to understand and explain abilities we and many other animals enjoy. Indeed, consciousness is almost certainly a great deal simpler than human vision - which requires enormous amounts of brain tissue and hundreds of millions of years of evolution to perfect. Consciousness seems to have taken only tens of millions of years to develop, and involves only a relatively small amount of the cerebral cortex.
Most of my post was reproduced from this fascinating piece of work by Bruce G Charlton MD: http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/awconlang.html
