According to a recent theory, the capacity for conscious awareness traces to the evolution of primitive brain areas designed to predict the organism’s likely future movements by generating a dynamic simulation or model of the organism itself. The appearance of the cortex added a whole new layer (literally) to the complexity and sophistication of this self-simulation ability, and consciousness emerged as a result.
A somewhat compelling theory, perhaps. But describing brain areas and their putative activities says absolutely nothing about consciousness.
Our first-person experiential awareness of the world is simply not something that can be explained by what happens inside brains. Consciousness cannot be found lurking within neural connections or patterns of brain activity. No matter how complex or nuanced or sophisticated this brain activity is, it is still just organized clusters of neurons engaged in interactive twitching.
Now, I understand and accept that my conscious awareness is correlated with the activity and structures of my nervous system. Pull out parts of my brain, and my conscious experience is likely to change. But that doesn’t mean that my conscious experience is being created by neural activity.
Perhaps, as panpsychic theories claim, consciousness is an imminent feature of the universe itself, a fundamental quality of matter, something that permeates everything, part of the substrate of reality, a primary feature of what the universe is, and physical brains act to compartmentalize this universal consciousness, temporarily sequester slivers of it.
Panpsychic notions seem at least as reasonable as the idea that the organized twitching of neurons can summon consciousness out of the void. And there are likely other possibilities that are just as reasonable, but that have yet to be conceived.
To explain consciousness in terms of brain activity is merely to restate the question.
Edit: here is a good, easy-to-understand article about the ridiculousness of thinking about brains as computers.
