> Consciousness. We could and should be robots. There is nothing to reproducing that requires this, which is the survival of the fittest. Humans are social ani

> Consciousness. We could and should be robots. There is nothing to reproducing that requires this, which is the survival of the fittest. Humans are social animals. To interact with other people, it is probably evolutionarily advantageous to have a mental model that can predict the actions of other people. Consciousness might be simply an offshoot of that mental model, in which a person predicts their own actions, too. I'm not saying that this theory is true, although I do think I heard it somewhere. (Maybe it's in I am a Strange Loop?) But it's just meant to be an example of how consciousness could arise as a side effect of something with an actual reproductive advantage.