What is Consciousness?
Totally unrelated to my previous post, I just came across this this essay from Nobel-prize winning economist R.J Aumann, which I very much enjoyed.
His central contention is this:
We next address the issue of "why": what is the function of consciousness, from, say, the evolutionary viewpoint? The answer we propose is based on the two related notions of decentralizing and decoupling-roughly speaking, splitting a difficult or complex task into several easier or less complex tasks, often with the aid of an auxiliary "driving force.