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Articles
A Role For Consciousness
David Hodgson pulls together his experience to understand experience.
One of the great enduring mysteries of science lies in the question What does consciousness do? Or more specifically, What if anything is achieved by subjective conscious experiences, such as visual and auditory experiences, conscious thoughts, and feelings such as pain and hunger, that is not achieved by physical brain processes unfolding in accordance with physical laws of nature?
Many scientists and philosophers would answer nothing. According to them, the physical world operates in accordance with the laws of physics, chemistry and biology, and is closed to being affected by anything non-physical. Thus, any effects that conscious experiences may have can only come about by virtue of physical brain processes that are associated with and perhaps constitute these experiences.
This physicalist approach, however, raises a question. If everything is achieved by physical processes operating in accordance with physical laws, why are some of these processes associated with subjective conscious experiences, when this association does precisely nothing? From an evolutionary viewpoint, this would not seem to make sense: the selection of consciousness through the survival and reproduction of conscious organisms strongly suggests that consciousness confers an advantage on an organism that has it.
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