The consciousness strategy

And so we come to the consciousness strategy: divide the problem in two, by splitting the CS into two sub-systems, loosely coupled. On the one hand, let us have a portion of the organism given over to the task of constructing a unified so-called "world" out of all the signals from each of the organism's signal channels (e.g., sight and hearing), but freed from the task of deciding upon a particular behavior or response – call this the "World Making System" or WMS. On the other hand, there is another portion of the control system that has the job of determining action, and takes selective portions of the prefabricated world as one of the inputs to that determination -- call this the "Behavior Determining System" or BDS. The loose coupling between the two systems -- "loose" because of the variety of inputs and factors that eventually result in behavior -- is described in the phenomenon of "attention", which can be focused in various directions, under algorthmic control.

And with this we have something that can rightly be called a "mind", whether implemented in cellular agglomerations, or silicon based circuits, or something else entirely. This is the defining structure of consciousness, and its functional advantage as a control system resides entirely in the flexibility gained through the loose coupling between its component subsystems.