⁸I’m not committing myself here to any particular philosophical stance, but just exploring different possibilities. Claiming that consciousness has no evolutionary function could be seen as a special case or implication of the stance called Epiphenomenalism (Walter, 2009), according to which consciousness has no causal effect on physical events. What I have written here is probably also compatible with the sophisticated alternative given by Chalmers (1996), who also addresses the obvious question of why there might be consciousness if it is not evolutionarily advantageous (his Section 3.6). Chalmers’s arguments rely heavily on considering what a zombie without any consciousness would be like compared to humans; I think his zombies are comparable to AI, which I assume is not conscious. Chalmers (1996) seems to agree on the difficulty of understanding consciousness: “[W]hen it comes to consciousness, it seems that all the alternatives [of philosophical stances] are bad. If someone comes away with the feeling that consciousness is simply an utter mystery, then that is not completely unreasonable.”