Fodor is undoubtedly asking the right question: “Why did God ― or natural selection ― make consciousness?” Yet, I would suggest the reason he finds it all so baffling is that he is starting off with completely the wrong premise. For he has assumed, as indeed almost everyone else does, that phenomenal consciousness must be providing us with some kind of new skill. In other words, it must be helping us do something that we can do only by virtue of being conscious ― like, say, a bird can fly only because it has got wings, or you can understand this sentence only because you know English. Yet I want to suggest the role of phenomenal consciousness may not be like this at all. Its role may not be to enable us to do something we could not do otherwise, but rather to encourage us to do something we would not do otherwise: to make us take an interest in things that otherwise would not interest us, or to mind about things we otherwise would not mind about, or to set ourselves goals we otherwise would not set.
To test this idea we will need evidence as to how being phenomenally conscious changes our world-view. What beliefs and attitudes flow from it? What changes occur in the way conscious individuals think about who and what they are? These are empirical questions, that can be answered only by careful fieldwork in the realm of conscious creatures. What is needed is a thorough-going natural history of consciousness. And it must be a programme of research in which we are ready to consider all sorts of possibilities ― not just those we would expect to find discussed in the science or philosophy section of the library but perhaps those that belong in the Self-Help section, Mind and Spirit, or even the New Age. Regrettably, this area of consciousness studies has been neglected by scientists (although artists have been involved with it since art began). I cannot claim to be more than an amateur myself.
All the same, I will not hold back from telling you my own main conclusion from a life-time's interest in what consciousness does. I may shock you by what may seem the naivety of my conclusion (I have shocked myself): I think the plain and simple fact is that consciousness ― on various levels ― makes life more worth living. We like being phenomenally conscious. We like the world in which we are phe-nomenally conscious. We like our selves for being phenomenally conscious. And the resulting joie de vivre, the enchantment with the world we live in, and the enhanced sense of our own metaphysical importance has in the course of evolutionary history turned our lives around.
