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Since everybody is sharing their pet theory, mine is that consciousness is a bug, a side effect of having a prefrontal cortex, long term memory and being able to "predict" the future. These tools have important needs for our survival, and come with the unintended effect of asking ourselves "who am I and what is my purpose?" Now it's too late for natural selection to select it out if not beneficial, for we have overridden and grown more powerful, at least in hubris, than Nature.

There is no purpose for humanity. No grand design. We are just replicating lifeforms that have gone self aware. Accept it, it's particularly freeing.

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That's what I personally feel too -- some few necessary components combine to give the illusion of self. I would add to this, though, the ability to perceive input from our senses and becoming an "observer", thus creating the separation of oneself from the universe: the self is who observes, everything else is the universe.

This distinction of self from the universe is also talked about in Buddhism as being a massive flaw of human understanding. In reality, all of us are one with the universe and arise from it.

You'd still need a new law of physics to explain that though. Ultimately every phenomena in the universe is explained by physics, so until consciousness is a part of physics we don't understand it.

Certain dolphins have larger prefrontal cortices with more neurons, are highly intelligent with the ability to predict and long term memory yet seem to lack what we think is a unique human capacity for first person introspective meta-cognition. Which is essentially what most and this article mean when talking about the hard problem or qualia.

We can also look at chimpanzees. They have a prefrontal cortex, future prediction and long term memory. While their prefrontal cortex is smaller, it is also the most human like. Yet, they too seemingly lack capacity for that human style of conscious being. There is alas, something more your definition has failed to touch upon.

> long term memory and being able to "predict" the future

If this were the case, wouldn't drugs that temporarily inhibit the access of long term memory and the ability to predict the future also inhibit consciousness? This doesn't appear to be the case, because high doses of psychedelics and dissociatives do this, but consciousness definitely continues, just in a very odd, altered state.

From what I understand of anesthetics, they do suppress consciousness. Or, at least, what little we understand consciousness to be.

I'd accept it, but it's illogical. There are just too many accidents needed to make this happen.

Paradoxically, at the same time our minds are so limited they can accept only two possibilities: (1) everything was created by a god, (2) everything happened by accident. My pet peeve is that there is a third option, but our minds are unable to grasp it.

Imagine if we could find a scientific explanation for consciousness, and that would lead to a ton of new discoveries. The world might become more sci-fi than we could ever dream of today.

So it is sad to see so many view this question as impossible to solve, or just give out hand wavy explanations like "computation" etc, rather than try to think about what would actually be required to understand what consciousness is.

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