Member-only story
Forget Qualia — The Useful Aspect of Consciousness is Self-Awareness
Many thinkers and writers about consciousness seem to be preoccupied with what they call “the hard problem of consciousness”. For details about that, Wikipedia is a good place to start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
To me that “problem” seems perhaps interesting but ultimately pointless and unsolvable. It’s comparable to the simple question “Why am I me, rather than someone else?” As some people answer that question, with a smile, “Somebody had to be you, so who better than you?”
I think the more useful question about consciousness has to do with self-awareness: To what extent are various systems self-aware, and how does that benefit them? And in particular, to what extent are we humans, and other living things, self-aware, and how does that benefit us?
As I have discussed in another essay (“The Universality of Life and Death”), active systems, including ones that we call “living” ones, range from tightly-coupled organisms like our individual human selves and other individual animals and plants, to loosely-coupled supra-organisms like flocks and herds of animals, fields and forests of plants, and human groups and societies.
