evolution

[Angrboda]

I think the likely explanation is consciousness facilitate a different kind of feed back complexity than other types of information processing in the brain.


Regarding the issue of whether there are specific region(s) of the brain that can be tied to consciousness, indications from disabling of specific regions of the brain by stroke suggest there are.       One such indicative stroke symptom is blind sight.     Here a stroke deprives the victim of the ability to see.   The victim reports total loss oh any sense of sight, even the capacity to perceive light and dark.    Yet if a ball is tossed to them without warning, they can capture is in midair.     If they are told to navigate a maze, they can do it without touch.

Test show these stroke victims lost conscious perception of sight so completely they will not even voluntarily hazard a guess of what shape is an object before their eyes.    Yet if asked to select from a range of choices of what shape,  they select 100% accurately over large number of tried.    It is as if disability of specific parts of the cortex deprived them of the ability to consciously know the fact that they know something through their senses.

Again, the problem is determining whether the fault occurs in areas responsible for consciousness or in areas responsible for informing consciousness. Additionally, multiple areas can and do cause blindsight. If anything, blindsight is a potent argument against simplistic theories of consciousness in that abilities which we normally assume require conscious awareness do not in fact require it. (Oh, and the presentation of blindsight is far more variegated than you describe.) Another relevant syndrome is Anton-Babinski syndrome in which a person is blind, yet steadfastly maintains that they can see. To explain this away as delusion seems entirely too facile. It suggests that conscious awareness at times may be so removed from actual reality as to possess no possible way to link such conscious experience as a cause of extra-conscious processes.