David Kyle Johnson

It's an interesting flip on the P zombie question, right?

Yeah.

And then he comes up with a couple of possible reasons, which again have all been stated before.

He said that it could be an epiphenomenon, not necessary, but just it happens to have emerged out of complex vertebrate neurology.

Or he could say that maybe you need consciousness in order to really experience pleasure and pain, and therefore, if the experience of positive and negative things is evolutionary adaptive, there needs to be a consciousness experiencing those things.

And then the third one he said was that maybe it was just random.

And in some ecosystems, like on another planet, there might be life that's not conscious.

On Earth, it happens to be conscious.

These are two different ways you could solve the behavior problem, and ours just happens to be with consciousness.

So I wrote about, when I wrote about this exact question previously, most recently in 2017…

In addition to the ones that Dawkins came up with, that was one.

It's like maybe we need consciousness to distinguish a memory from a live experience, because otherwise it's the same parts of the brain lighting up.

There are some philosophers who think that problem solving could benefit from a consciousness, being conscious of our prior attempts, of being able to imagine things.

How could you imagine things if you don't have some kind of consciousness?

I think a big one for me is attention because we are overwhelmed with sensory input and we have to attend to a subset of it.

And how do you separate attention from consciousness?

That may not be a solvable problem.

You may need consciousness in order to know what stimulus you need to attend to.

And beyond that,

Our brains weave all of this cacophony of sensory input into a seamless experience of reality.