Consciousness Cannot Have Evolved

I apologize if I am misrepresenting the article points, but in this kind of discussion often the only thing I see is &quot;If we take unnecessarily strict dictionary definition of terms then obvious things become false&quot;<p>There are interesting ways to look at consciousness, e.g. you can look at it in terms of how the psychology of an individual evolves over time, or you can study apparent and emerging structures in the psyche and its illnesses (personally I am a fan of Jung&#x27;s approach).<p>I am not even saying that this article is unnecessary by itself. The author is not straw-manning the opposition, it is just that the whole debate looks like a caste in the sky we would be better of dropping.

The article sustains that for consciousness to exist, it should have an evolutionary advantage. It could be something emergent from the complexity of the brain, having a language or different capabilities (pattern matching, cognitive biases, story telling, etc) that enable us to make sorts of long term future predictions, to name a few. And all of them do have evolutionary advantages.