A New Thinking Emerges About Consciousness:

“The feeling you have as you read this sentence, (Harvard neuroscientist Daniel) Wegner argues, is an illusion pulled off by a complex machine in your skull. It not only reads and understands this sentence, he says, but also makes you feel as if you have experienced the reading of the sentence. In other words, the brain, not content with being a remarkably complex machine, also convinces itself that it isn’t a machine at all.

But why would it bother? The brain, Wegner contends, produces consciousness to give itself a feeling of having done something. This feeling helps the brain recognize similar situations when they arise — the next article in the newspaper, for instance. Being aware of its actions, the brain-machine can better decide whether to read another article.” Washington Post