Опять же,

Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself. ...

© The Selfish Gene. Вы уж меня простите, но я 10 лет назад про это писал (он, конечно, раньше)

funny thing is - Dawkins says something like "if consciousness is self-monitoring, then why not monitoring self-monitoring and so on". The guy surely understands something about evolution, so why did not he answer that self-self-monitoring or monitoring self-monitoring etc just won't be adaptive? Basically, it might even exist to some degree, but it peteres out real quick, otherwise it would consume all brain resources, nothing would be left to do real monitoring of the outside world.

This level of recursion (and there's some, i think) should be fine-tuned by the evolution, just like everything else.

Adaptive value of consciousness as such is not really clear to me. As i said before, it might be a by-product of the brain evolution. May be it's the result of this overshot, mentioned by runaway sexual selection, mentioned by David Brin in his Neoteny article.

Again, i said this before: the brain was designed to answer the question "how", not the question "why".  ¶ 11:07 PM