What is consciousness for?

ABSTRACT

Organization of behavior is grounded on several stages of processing of information by the nervous system, one of which is identification of the original information, through which it acquires meaning. Only after this stage can a decision be made and can a behavioral pattern, specific to what has been identified, be produced. The conscious process is one of the mechnisms of identification of neural information. At any given moment, consciousness is identifying just an extremely narrow band of what is going on in the nervous system, while most information is being processed by nonconscious mechanisms. This selectivity allows precise attention. Conscious identification of any information is always followed by a specific behavior. Therefore, consciousness is neither a uselles epiphenomenon nor a nonspecific, passive by-product of neural activity which just "watches" what is going on inside and outside of the body. It is neither an initial nor a final stage in the organization of behavior but a specific. highly precise intermediate stage.