From an evolutionary point of view, the purpose of consciousness seems to be this: an animal composed of a giant collection of zombie systems would be energy efficient but cognitively inflexible. It would have economical programs for doing particular, simple tasks, but it wouldn’t have rapid ways of switching between programs or setting goals to become expert in novel and unexpected tasks. In the animal kingdom, most animals do certain things very well (say, prying seeds from the inside of a pine cone), while only a few species (such as humans) have the flexibility to dynamically develop new
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