Trying to simplify my Consciousness hypothesis

[Won2blv]

     What makes more sense, that we have mental problems, strictly because of something that happened in our short life, that is a blip of a blip of a blip on the grand evolutionary timeframe?

.......Yes?

Let's say that you have a phobia.  You're afraid of the dark.  Now....all of your peers come equipped with the same evolutionary apparatus and history, but they aren't afraid of the dark.  Clearly, the problem has it's origin with the individual.  Now sure, there are some ticks of the mind that seem to be uniform to human beings and we can attribute those to our common biological heritage, and we do.  These things aren't ignored by therapists.

What I was saying is that our consciousness is like an iceberg, and sometimes we focus more on the tip rather than the iceberg as a whole. But clearly it does not have its origin with the individual because it is common to be afraid of the dark. Especially among children. You could postulate a lot of reason why we're afraid of the dark in an evolutionary way

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I never understand the mystery about consciousness.

As far as I'm concerned it's just an evolutionary by-product, a side effect. We don't need to be conscious but we just are. I guess consciousness is the side effect that naturally happens when brains get complex enough.

And the whole "How can consciousness emerge from the physical?" thing is just a complete equivocation. Mental can be physical. It's not a contradiction.

Why would evolution arrive at a by-product which cannot be seen, cannot be measured, and is known only to exist through subjective agency?  Saying "consciousness is useful" is pretty meaningless when consciousness is only a collection of material interactions.  Why wouldn't a brain just take in data, process it, and output behavior, without the organism ever knowing what it's like  to experience hot chocolate in early fall or whatever?

This is the real problem-- if physical interactions are sufficient to explain behavior, then why would the universe give us this added "bonus" of being aware of those physical interactions?

I think that you're asking the question the wrong way. You should qualify it first with an "as far as we know."

As far as your other question goes about a robot like brain... Do you see the evolutionary advantage of being more consciously aware of useful adaptations? Why do you think it is so scientifically mysterious to us how life started in the first place? Then in turn, how that life evolved from a single celled organism to a larger organism. Single cells floated around for almost 3 billion years before they evolved to a more complex structure.

I think they're big mysteries because they are just simply accidents. When Darwin proposed evolution, he made predictions. He made predictions because he knew that they would have to be true if his theory was true. We can in turn take seemingly "odd" evolutionary products, like the platypus, and also use the evolutionary tree to explain that.

So why wouldn't evolution naturally select organisms that had an ability to be more proactive at living and passing on their life?

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@bennyboy

How come seemingly immaterial emotions can have a physical emotion? Take stress for example, how come an abundant amount of stress can take a toll on us physically? Or nervous causing our heart rate to rise? Maybe those feelings are just our other body parts reporting back to the brain in simplistic terms