Consciousness, Representation, Action The Importance of Being Goal-Directed

Recent years have witnessed fierce debates on the dependence of
consciousness on interactions between a subject and the environment.
Reviewing neuroscientific, computational, and clinical evidence, I will
address three questions. First, does conscious experience necessarily
depend on acute interactions between a subject and the environment?
Second, does it depend on specific perception–action loops in the longer
run? Third, which types of action does consciousness cohere with, if
not with all of them? I argue that conscious contents do not necessarily
depend on acute or long-term brain–environment interactions. Instead,
consciousness is proposed to be specifically associated with, and
subserve, deliberate, goal-directed behavior (GDB). Brain systems
implied in conscious representation are highly connected to, but
distinct from, neural substrates mediating GDB and declarative memory.