Panpsychism is not as crazy as it sounds.

[Mudhammam]

I wasn't off-topic. I was still responding to this bit from the OP.

[quote='Pickup_shonuff' pid='645245' dateline='1396742910']
Epiphenomenalism seems to run into a Darwinian problem. If consciousness is basically useless, perhaps a "byproduct" of other functions, why did/does evolution select for it?

Ah, sorry, I must have had a brain fart.

Knowing that there is consciousness, we can't say that consciousness must have appeared because of the principles of evolution (random mutation + natural selection).

I'm inclined to agree but I can see where a plausible argument might be made to the contrary. The mind is still greatly misunderstood. It seems hard to reconcile classical determinism with the phenomenon of consciousness, its causal functions (e.g. such thoughts propelling one to action) secondary at best, probably inessential, as a reductionist model of the brain explains more and more.

We can only say that it must have appeared somehow, even if through the interaction of dozens upon dozens of "random" forces.

By random forces, we're actually talking about Darwinian selection, are we not? In which case, it makes sense that nature would select for intelligence but not necessarily consciousness (think computer).

With the post hoc knowledge that consciousness did appear, we can say that it probably had a high probability of appearing (allowing for quantum randomness, of course), but we cannot say that consciousness should be probable even if we're pretending to not know things that we really do know, like what evolution is going to produce. You can't place yourself at the dawn of biological life, then say, "We have to imagine that we don't know whether evolution will produce consciousness, but consciousness has to be probable because we know evolution is going to produce it." The implicit assumption is that evolution alone is responsible for consciousness. Consciousness could be due to the interaction of dozens upon dozens of "random" forces that are unrelated to the theory of evolution. The fact that it did happen doesn't indicate that the explanation has to be simple, i.e. that the event had to follow from just a few basic assumptions.

Whether or not consciousness is a local cosmic accident via the atoms that created the first life forms, that then evolved to produce brains like ours, or something deeply embedded in the fundamental structure of the Universe that guarantees it's arrival at some point in the history of time, seems like a pretty open ended question.