> I assert it's very likely that nature didn't evolve conscious brains by accident, it's probably a byproduct of making an intelligence that can reason about itself and its environment.
I think you're exactly right; Michael Graziano's theory of consciousness it that it starts as a necessary function for modeling the attention of an agent and turns into awareness when the brain itself is modeled as an agent. First, a specialized brain function for agent modeling of predator/prey/rival/mate evolves as a good trait for survival. Part of that function entails modeling what an agent is attentive to. However, once this agent model discovers the brain it is running on, a new agent is recognized, and attention now becomes redundant and is instead reported as awareness of attention, which has to feel subjectively like a secondary aspect of primary sensory information. It's a nice logical progression. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3223025/
I think you're exactly right; Michael Graziano's theory of consciousness it that it starts as a necessary function for modeling the attention of an agent and turns into awareness when the brain itself is modeled as an agent. First, a specialized brain function for agent modeling of predator/prey/rival/mate evolves as a good trait for survival. Part of that function entails modeling what an agent is attentive to. However, once this agent model discovers the brain it is running on, a new agent is recognized, and attention now becomes redundant and is instead reported as awareness of attention, which has to feel subjectively like a secondary aspect of primary sensory information. It's a nice logical progression. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3223025/