There is one particular thing which evolution does not explain and
which virtually
every being has, namely consciousness, awareness, perception or
experience (experience is here not referring to accumulated knowledge,
it refers to being aware of something). I will
use these terms synonymously in this text, not because they are
necessarily perfect synonyms, but because it helps to convey what
I want to say.
I think it can be useful to mention here that some
persons may have to try to understand these terms from a new
perspective in order to follow the arguments presented here.
In this I would even go so far as to say that meditation
or similar methods may help to achieve that.
The idea of evolution is that only those things evolve that help a
species to survive. Does consciousness help species to survive? When
I say consciousness I don't mean the ability to respond to stimuli,
I mean the awareness of stimuli (and of response),
i.e. the experience.
A machine can respond to stimuli, your computer
does it, a burglar alarm does it, a speech recognition system does
it, robots do it. But these machines do not perceive anything during
this process.
Our bodies and brains also respond to stimuli. It
is the ability to react or
respond to stimuli that is advantageous for the survival of the
species, not the awareness of such things.
The fact that there is
an experience accompanying such
processes is not giving any extra advantage for survival, i.e. from
the point of view of survival, consciousness is of no value. The
machines mentioned before would not become more useful if there was
an awareness accompanying their ability to respond to stimuli.
Thus, consciousness can not be explained by evolution.
Inspite of this, virtually all beings are conscious, they
perceive, they experience.
A natural question then arises. Why are we conscious?