by Bernardo Kastrup The Institute of Art and Ideas The overwhelmingly validated theory of evolution tells us that the functions performed by our organs arose from associated increases in survival fitness. For instance, the bile produced by our liver and the insulin produced by our pancreas help us absorb nutrients and thus survive. Insofar as it is produced by the brain, our phenomenal consciousness — i.e. our ability to subjectively experience the world and ourselves — is no exception: it, too, must give us some survival advantage, otherwise natural selection wouldn't have fixed it in our genome. In other words, our sentience — to the extent that it is produced by the brain — must perform a beneficial function, otherwise we would be unconscious zombies. One problem with this is that, under the premises of materialism, phenomenal consciousness cannot — by definition — have a function. According to materialism, all entities are defined and exhaustively characterised in purely