Brains are to consciousness as plants are to sunlight

Natural selection made use of consciousness. It didn't create it.

People often wonder why natural selection went to the trouble of creating consciousness.

The obvious answer: it didn't.

I offer this idea as a compelling hypothesis not an assertion.

Just as sunlight was present before natural selection created photosynthesis, consciousness was present before nervous systems.

Natural selection made use of consciousness. It didn't create it.

Making use of something is much easier to explain than creating something because it's much less costly. It's less of a climb in search space.

To understand this idea, you must be able to consider that consciousness and the mental activities of which we're conscious (thoughts, emotions, sensations, memories, etc.) are different; that consciousness is an aspect of the universe and our conscious experiences are something else. The human mind has a natural tendency to conflate the two things. For the most part Western thinkers have had nothing to say about this conflation, but some of the old Indian soteriological traditions have a technical term for it, avidya. People can observe the difference between consciousness and the mental phenomena of which we're conscious if they take the trouble to do so. I'll return to these topics at more length in future articles.

This tendency toward conflation is reflected in English vocabulary. We have two distinct words, "sunlight" and "photosynthesis", for the easily-understood case but no analogous pair of words for the other case. The single word "consciousness" conflates the two meanings we need.

This hypothesis is not panpsychism. "Sunlight was already there" doesn't imply that "all objects perform photosynthesis". Similarly, "consciousness was already there" doesn't imply that "everything has conscious experiences."

I'm not saying consciousness is fundamental. I have no idea if it's made of other things or can be explained as interactions between other things. All I've said here about consciousness is that it existed before nervous systems and that natural selection used it but didn't make it.

I'll keep this short because really, all that needs to be said is this:

Consider the possibility that conscious experience is to consciousness as photosynthesis is to sunlight. The last sentence is a little confusing because as I wrote earlier, we have no unambiguous English words to distinguish the contents of consciousness from consciousness itself.