The Philosophy of Mind: Zombies, "radical emergence" and evidence of non-experiential

[The Grand Nudger]

Personally, I would caution against any notion that consciousness does nothing and provides no benefit.  There are many evolutionary pathways to flight, or any other number of functional spaces for adaptation, as well.  It might be that behavior x is possible some other way (even many other ways), as it is with different types and paths to wings or flight, for example...but it would be a reach to then say that the specific manner in which a creature achieves behavior x is therefore useless

Ironically THIS begs the question. The entire point is there's no evidence that consciousness does anything useful and you are making an analogy that consciousness is like pathways to flight, which just presupposes that consciousness is a pathway and is already useful. You're basically just saying "But in this case it is useful" and comparing it to flight. It's pathetic. You haven't shown that consciousness is useful, and the evidence points in the other direction. How is it useful? And the evidence indicates otherwise. This is (one of) my entire points... which you haven't addressed. And you haven't even replied to many of the others.

The evidence strongly suggests that consciousness is not only not what we thought it was, or what it seemed to be, that it does not do what we imagined it would in some specific sense, sure.   You reference real time decision making and control, as an example.  Consciousness may not be necessary for a specific type of information processing, or..put another way, consciousness may not be required for computational competence (in fact..we're sure that it isn't).  

However, not being useful at that thing does not imply or demonstrate that there is no use..and, personally, I find it difficult to divorce consciousness from immensely important selective advantages that our species possesses both as a description and direct product of our experience.  Our art, our culture, our communication of first person experience, the relationships we build upon those assumptions, our comprehension as designers of things with understood relationships to ourselves and each other.  

They don't seem like an irrelevance...maybe to computational competence in real time decision making...but biologically speaking, we're not here where we are because we're swift of tooth and nail or because we can add real quick.