I think consciousness is something of an accident, like so many things in the world. It seems to be useful, perhaps something like how it’s useful for a crow to be able to bend a metal wire, put it in the glass bottle and hook the food that the intelligence researchers cleverly placed inside the bottle. The world is shaped in such a way so as to reward such things and maybe conciouness is rewarding on a meta cognitive level, like solving certain problems become easier with a consciousness. It doesn’t seem independent of the world, but rather is, and we are, a reflection of the world’s sensory input. The world has hallucinated an image of itself.

When consciousness lights up during a lucid dream, the sensory perception is real enough so as to be confused for the real thing. Maybe the real thing is something of a dream. When Shakespeare wrote, “We are such stuff as dreams are made of” in The Tempest, that seems to me to have been not far from the mark.