That's a side stepping answer. He's looking at the origins/causes of concious thought as we know it. Suggesting that it is a 'byproduct' (really, what the fuck is a by product -- in a loosely defined biological system?) is stating the obvious. The mechanisms are in question, not the whole system.
Put simply, we don't know. Neuroscience and psychology are attempting to figure exactly that out, but from different approaches. One attempts to build a model from the ground up (which is difficult, considering that molecular level interactions are sources of change in the cell as a whole) while another attempts to distill down from what it observes and conjectures from the mind and it's actions and how such a system can be generalized to explain people. Bottom up versus top down.
Issue with the former is scale and complexity, the latter, is nigh impossible to verify/prove.
Put simply, we don't know. Neuroscience and psychology are attempting to figure exactly that out, but from different approaches. One attempts to build a model from the ground up (which is difficult, considering that molecular level interactions are sources of change in the cell as a whole) while another attempts to distill down from what it observes and conjectures from the mind and it's actions and how such a system can be generalized to explain people. Bottom up versus top down.
Issue with the former is scale and complexity, the latter, is nigh impossible to verify/prove.
Slave to the Patriarchy no more
