Pathological complexity and the evolution of consciousness

According to the following article it seems that consciousness evolved to handle the 'pathological complexity' problem. The key for this solution appears to be the development of our feeling valence that allowed for an evolutionary functional fit with our environment. (Sounds a lot like Damasio here).

It also seems that the crux of the problem is how our 'false' reasoning takes a regressive step back into pathological complexity because of its obsession with ever more abstraction that dissociates from our feeling valence necessary to what Lakoff calls 'real reason.'

 

Complexity and the evolution of consciousness. Abstract:

 

"This article introduces and defends the ‘pathological complexity thesis’ as a hypothesis about the evolutionary origins of minimal consciousness, or sentience, that connects the study of animal consciousness closely with work in behavioural ecology and evolutionary biology. I argue that consciousness is an adaptive solution to a design problem that led to the extinction of complex multicellular animal life following the Avalon explosion and that was subsequently solved during the Cambrian explosion. This is the economic trade-off problem of having to deal with a complex body with high degrees of freedom, what I call ‘pathological complexity’. By modeling the explosion of this computational complexity using the resources of state-based behavioral and life-history theory we will be able to provide an evolutionary bottom-up framework to make sense of subjective experience and its function in nature by paying close attention to the ecological lifestyles of different animals."