It helps to have both a computational understanding, and a computational perspective of what minds do to understand why consciousness is needed. Consciousness

It helps to have both a computational understanding, and a computational perspective of what minds do to understand why consciousness is needed. Consciousness is a consensus mechanism. I've co-authored a book where we talk about what's the most computationally robust and biologically plausible model of consciousness. It is only now, two years after the book, that I realized that the best phrasing for what consciousness is must be one that takes into account the Truly Hard Problem of Consciousnss: Who is feeling it? With every other phrasing or definition the "I" is implicit and taken for granted. So the question becomes "Why does this have to feel like anything?" The answer, it turns out, is that both experience and the experiencer are constructed together in a virtuous loop. You are a constellation of experiences. Consciousness is the consensus mechanism by which a chorus emerges in this constellation. And why is one needed? Because the decentralized entity that is you must act as one at all times, and especially when rare risks or outstanding opportunities present themselves. When we take the "I" for granted, we simply do not realize the staggeringly immense computational challenge it is to stitch this subjective self together. What sets apart this explanation is not just this broad-strokes perspective, but the biologically plausible mechanism by which top-down expectations (your past experiences) match up with bottom-up sensory data (ambiguous and potentially overwhelming reality) More here: https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-mechanism-2b399c9ec4b5 https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-me... More here: