Solving for the Necessity of Phenomenal Consciousness

For better or worse, biological consciousness continues to inspire our thinking about machine consciousness. It is our only available source of testable knowledge about the phenomenon. Only some, or none, or all of these insights may eventually apply to digital minds: extrapolate with caution. That said, we should be more relentless in attempting to solve the hard problem of consciousness, especially as it relates to selfhood. It's fascinating and may soon turn out to be extremely important. For epistemic status, scroll to the bottom of the page. Introduction Everything in the history of a species traces its roots back to evolution, and in evolution, the million-dollar question is why . From an infinite possibility space, some strangely specific and recurrent patterns emerged and stabilized, then remained in existence for millions of years. Why were these singular patterns favored? For example, distantly related species have independently developed the camera eye, in which a lens focuses an image onto a sheet of photoreceptors. Of all the possible engineering solutions, why this one and why more than once? A plausible explanation looks like so: a moving animal needs to know where t