We obviously don't have the full picture about sensations -- they might be a side effect of specialized (biochemical) neural architectures, but more likely ther

We obviously don't have the full picture about sensations -- they might be a side effect of specialized (biochemical) neural architectures, but more likely there is something intrinsic to them that grants advantages to sensations. There's something to making things really "personal" to an individual system having sensations that make it act in its best interest. Sensations are also very flexible biochemical abstractions and solutions to problems across aeons. It would have been quite hard for organisms to evolve without such abstractions -- like a worm recoiling in pain and a human quickly rettacting his burnt hand or avoiding certain kinds of people who have hurt him before.