Pretty interesting paper. What is consciousness, and how do we explain it from an evolutionary perspective? According to this author, it is the brain anticipating events in the world before they happen. "The brain is not a marvelous computer in any classical sense - we can barely manage a seven-digit span, but it is a phenomenally sensitive anticipator of environmental and behavioral change. Subjective consciousness has its survival value in enabling us to jump out of the way when a tiger is about to strike, not so much in computing which path the tiger might be on, (because this is an intractable problem, and the tiger can also take it into account in avoiding the places we would expect it to most likely be), but by intuitive conscious anticipation." There's a lot more in here - it's a difficult paper to read, written at a high level, but rewards the effort.
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