Consciousness!!!

If there is one thing that always eluded both scientists and philosophers alike, its consciousness...many scientists and philosophers tried to explain it in their own way and a few even dragged quatumn mechanics into this...
so wuts this thingie exactly???

def: "Consciousness is a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment." --wikipedia.org


although the definition looks simple, there is no real test to conclude that something has consciousness (there are tests for certain aspects of it like Turing test, mirror test etc.,)
after all this hype, do u think I am gonna crack that!! that too in this lil blog :p
don't worry, here I am present my views on why consciousness could have evolved...
as usual I am not gonna use mystical things like god, spirit etc as my hypotheses...

to start with, everyone of us knew that we do certain things consciously and others unconsciously...
taking a look at our brain... It evolved in such a way tht we have 2 kinds of processes
one is unconscious way like animals (most animals don't have consciousness or atleast they did not pass the mirror and other tests and I am making an assumption that our brain is no more special than other animals except we have different count of neurons), and they are good at surviving... ('course we differ from them due to more neurons(per body weight) n connections and we have better computaional power like a better chip...)
but evolution somehow chose a second way of doing things (or controlling body)...
the conscious way... If doing things unconsciously is good enough why did we evolve consciousness in first place??

Conscious computation always does things by following the steps as u learned them... So while thinking consciously or taking decisions consciously, for eg. calculating 23 times 47 you always do the computation by reciting the steps u learned... So u calculate at the rate you speak!!! this is a limitation of conscious thinking... but definitely u can do better than that... there are living examples like savants who compute by seeing numbers (I remember a British savant doing that) and hence way faster than most of us...
moreover, our brain controls our conscious perception by allowing it to see a part of reality or sometimes distorted reality as in the case of seeing ghosts, god etc., so consciously we see wut we are allowed to see by our brain
clearly in the above 2 cases, conscious thinking is crippling our computational capacity...
this following your acts consciously to do a task is to mimic others and which is basic in humans

but there is something that dwarfened these.... It is the ability to learn frm others and to teach others
the techniques or knowledge we gained and this prevents us from reinventing the wheel. As we know tht neural networks can't give us the method/mechanism to solve but jus solves... Conscious thinking gives the method too, but at the price of our computational capacity and this ability is much more powerful than we can think of.
I think this is the reason why we more developed than other species... and so this property of consciousness evolved and survied...

In conclusion, I would like to quote my favourite person, Isaac Newton-"If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." and that explains it all...


PS:Well... nobody really understood how brain works till now... though we know a few things abt brain, like its made up of neurons and they communicate by chemical transmitters etc.,
so this is a pure speculation of my own...