Christianity is heading for a full allegorization

[Ferrocyanide]

Consciousness entails:

1) Awareness of "now" experience.
2) Imagining potential or past experiences.
3) Awareness of making choices.
4) A sense of self, to keep the self living.

Where does the self "awareness" come from?  One could imaging a p-zombie making predictions and making choices.  Trained AI does it all the time.

Consciousness exists because it is likely the only way nature could come up with to do the above 4 things.  It likely requires a particular mode of operation.  If we can understand the mode of operation, it would be possible to replicate.  Then, our AI robot would also be conscious.

One could create an AI that doesn't have this mode of operation, yet still does some tasks very well.  I would argue that it likely wouldn't have a sense of self, or be as flexible in its thinking.

I was thinking about the Evolution side as well. How did it come about? Is it useful?
For example, if a dog doesn't have the same level of consciousness as we do, then our consciousness isn't unnecessary.
Same situation for an insect.
As for bacteria, yeast, plants, they don't have consciousness.

(**I imagine that a dog has a consciousness that is very close to ours.
Insects would be a very low order of consciousness.
Something like that. I'm not 100% sure how to define consciousness).

I imagine that nature came up with it as an accident. It did not interfere with the operation of the animal. Maybe there were some benefits attached to consciousness such as good visual and audio processing, good memory access and remembering past problems and solutions.

For example, some people are really good at composing poetry and music. It's not really useful for survival but it is a byproduct.
Humans are just using their thought patterns to create entertainment. Maybe they do it to impress themselves and to impress others but it is mostly a waste of joules.



Some science documentaries have said that maybe the universe created us to understand itself.
I say, no. It is just a byproduct of curiosity. Curiosity can help the creature to look around for food, it makes a mental 3D map of its environment, it remembers where his home is.