Consciousness - a Just -So Story

I don't actually know what consciousness is -- but I am fairly confident that we don't need any "Sky Hooks" as Dennett likes to call the unexplainable, semimagical mechanisms that allow us to avoid mundane, biological reasons for human features.

My notion is summarized in the idea that any animal that has a brain complex enough that it has to engage in some form of internal "debate" to figure out what to do next will be conscious in some fashion. More on this later. But there appear to be animals that are essentially on autopilot all the time -- wasps (the various burrowing wasps which paralyze their prey before laying eggs in the still living victim will repeat all the steps to bring the prey into the burrow over and over if the naturalist interrupts the steps by moving the victim, for example), ants, bees might operate somewhat like I do when I drive my car and forget whether I made the turn off or not. Human beings (I certainly) can perform a variety of tasks that don't engage the conscious brain .... some simpler animals might have only this capability.

But as animals get larger and evolve other features it sometimes appears to be advantageous to hone the decision circuits of the brain to make overt comparisons of possible solutions rather than going through stereotyped routines whenever there is a certain stimulus. This internal "debate" will be seen subjectively as "consciousness." The implication here is that I think that there are some animals that are conscious in some form or other that have been excluded in the past. For example, I would allow that (say) cattle or dogs or raccoons are conscious in some fashion. The convention that an animal must be able to recognize itself in a mirror seems to be too restrictive to me.

I am left with a problem with the larger reptiles. They are big and long-lived but their brains appear too small to accommodate the kind of consciousness that I am postulating so I don't pretend to have this little story nailed down.

But I do think that since we are human beings and we tend to magnify all our traits, it may be that we are making of consciousness more than it needs to be. We'll see.