APPENDIX C: Author's Note - On where I am coming from.     I have been bothered about consciousness for a very long time. My interest was kindled when I was a Post-Doc in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh University. That was over 40 years ago.     At that time I was trying to develop an intelligent computer-assisted learning system and for this I wanted to provide it with a clever interface which could converse with students using normal English. Having tried the conventional techniques like keyword analysis and syntactical analysis, I became disillusioned and decided that none of that stuff would ever produce a satisfactory system. I decided then, that if my system was going to chat with students, it had to understand what it was talking about. So it had to be a system endowed with full-blown intelligence, And for that it had to have a conscious understanding of what was being said. At that time the syntactical analysis of Noam Chomsky was fashionable and favoured. My heresy did not appeal to my superiors.     Conscious experience is probably the aspect of our everyday lives, with which we are most familiar. It is also, paradoxically, the aspect of our lives about which (some would say) we have the least understanding.     To explore and develop my ideas I traced the notional path of evolution backwards. At each stage the question I asked myself was ...     So if we reached this point THEN, where were we just before THEN so that we could have reached THERE in one small and advantageous step?     Allow me, please, to apologise for the way this text is presented. I have abandoned the conventions of scientific discourse and presented an argument which is pure conjecture. I apologise to those who probably know a lot more, than I do, about current research in this field. I suggest that they may find that the only relevant bits, in this text, are -     * The Abstract;     * The Introduction (section 1); and     * The Discussion (section 5).     I also apologise to those who are keen to inform themselves of research facts. I am not offering any new research information. This text is only about a conjecture - an idea, which has nagged at me during the years when I was teaching more normal stuff about computers, programming languages, databases, logic ... all that mundane stuff.     So this text is not focused on new experimental findings. Instead it is supported by arguments. And the main issue on which it is based is evolution - one of the best ideas a human being has ever had. In this text I offer an argument that consciousness, like almost every other aspect of our biological being, came about because of evolution, because it provided us with better ways to think and thus to decide how to act, and because of that, because we became consciously aware of what we were doing, we humans (and a great many other kinds of creature as well) were able then to survive and to multiply a bit better than creatures which were doing things without being consciously aware of what they were doing - or at the very least being able to remember what they had done and to remember what it felt like to be consciously aware of what they had been doing.     Anyway ... Prior to all that, (for my first paid employment - and as an undergraduate) I spent a year and a half in Antarctica, plodding through snow and measuring glaciers. 1957, was called "The International Geophysical Year" and I was the UK government's sole (and, so far as I could see, generally ignored) Antarctic representative of that collective effort. Glaciers, you see, with their slow ponderous advance to the sea, act a bit like climate tape-recorders. We knew then that there was something funny happening to the world's climate, but we did not quite know what it was. Since then I have followed the unfolding story of global climate change and watched the preposterous antics of the climate change denialist industry.     I saw there also a strange parallel with the well funded publishing industry which gives us a stream of books and journal articles on consciousness, all of which seem to promote magical non-explanations over hard-won scientific evidence. Many (so-called) experts in the field of consciousness have a vested interest in trying to convince us that consciousness is a very very mysterious thing indeed. And that is important. In their account consciousness is a "thing", a very mysterious thing (and not just another way in which we are able to behave). So mysterious is it, in these accounts, that it can only be "explained" by claiming that it cannot be explained. You work that one out please.     So I am a bit of a rebel. And on the climate change thing, I am also a bit of a rebel - at least I was - the world seems to have wakened up recently. I applaud those school children who are marching and demonstrating for something effective to be done about it - before we need to deal (humanely I hope) with hundreds of millions of desperate humans fleeing from rising sea-waters and from fields which annoyingly refuse to grow crops, because they are a considerable depth below the waves.     During my time in Antarctica, when I tired of the conversation in our base hut with seven other guys (which happened all too often), and having no other access to the outside world that did not involve tapping comments on a morse key (or asking someone else, as it turned out, very unreliable person to do that for you) ... then, on a nice, dry, windless day (which did not happen often enough) I used to go out for a yowl with (my friends) the dogs. Given their dinner of frozen seal-meat, and then a few bars of a human intro, they sang beautifully, and in harmony ......     .... Ah yes .... Back to the present. Where was I? .... Feel free please, to consider this text to be just another yowl of protest with the dogs.