An Attempt at Defining Consciousness

"The popular evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins has said that the biggest unsolved mystery in Biology is - what is consciousness and why did it emerge?

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?

"Modern purpose machines use extensions of basic principles like negative feedback to achieve much more complex 'lifelike' behaviour. Guided missiles, for example, appear to search actively for their target, and when they have it in range they seem to pursue it, taking account of its evasive twists and turns, and sometimes even 'predicting' or 'anticipating' them. The details of how this is done are not worth going into. They involve negative feedback of various kinds, 'feed-forward', and other principles well understood by engineers and now known to be extensively involved in the working of living bodies. Nothing remotely approaching consciousness needs to be postulated, even though a layman, watching its apparently deliberate and purposeful behaviour, finds it hard to believe."

WHY DID CONSCIOUSNESS EMERGE?

He speculates that consciousness must have been a product of our ancestors having to create a model of the world in which they inhabited.

To be able to think ahead (even if it's just one step into the future), and plan for eventualities must have led to the development of consciousness which gradually improved from its primitive form to the type of consciousness we now have.

"Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself. Obviously the limbs and body of a survival machine must constitute an important part of its simulated world; presumably for the same kind of reason, the simulation itself could be regarded as part of the world to be simulated. Another word for this might indeed be 'self awareness', but I don't find this a fully satisfying explanation of the evolution of consciousness, and this is only partly because it involves an infinite regress-if there is a model of the model, why not a model of the model of the model...?"

The quoted passages are from his book, The Selfish Gene."

https://www.rxjourney.net/extraterrestrial-intelligence-and-...