I believe consciousness as humans use it is found in the fitness landscape of evolution; that is, we didn’t HAVE to be conscious the way we are; the environment our evolutionary ancestors were in could have ended up in them evolving in similarly “fit for the environment” but different ways that wouldn’t have ended up with our own species having the capability to develop consciousness as we know it.
Perhaps we’d be even MORE suitable for these environments had we NOT developed the kind of consciousness that we have, but evolutionarily ended up in a different valley or on a different hill that solved OTHER problems.
Our development into the kinds of beings that we are is the result of being a SOLUTION to problems.
What are those problems? I don’t know. I can only speculate. But we were possible BECAUSE the room/capability (affordance) was there for a system to develop (us) that co-operated in the environment for some benefit to the system as a whole as well as the developed system that came with it (us and our consciousness)
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