The function of consciousness is to generate experience

Consciousness is not a useless side effect of brain activity but serves a core function: it enables subject-level experience, or 'what it feels like.' This experience has intrinsic value that motivates agents to act, prefer certain states, and avoid others. Conscious experience acts as a mental currency, allowing comparison of vastly different experiences within a unified subjective space. This explains why consciousness is unified. If consciousness functions to endow agents with subjective experience, the hard problem of consciousness dissolves.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Why would we do anything at all if the doing was not doing something to us? In other words: What is consciousness good for? Here, reversing classical views, according to many of which subjective experience is a mere epiphenomenon that affords no functional advantage, we propose that the core function of consciousness is precisely to enable subject-level experience. “What it feels like” is endowed with intrinsic value, and it is precisely the value agents associate with their experiences that explains why we do certain things and avoid others. Thus, we argue that it is only in virtue of the fact that conscious agents experience things and care about those experiences that they are motivated to act in certain ways and that they prefer some states of affairs vs. others. In this sense, conscious experience functions as a mental currency of sorts, which not only endows mental states with intrinsic value, but also makes it possible for conscious agents to compare vastly different experiences in a common subject-centered space — a feature that readily explains the fact that consciousness is unified. If, as we argue, the function of consciousness is to endow agents with subjective experience, then the hard problem of consciousness seems to dissolve.