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[I wrote:] Why do you presume that evolution, in the comprehensive way that it performs countless "feelers" of trial-and-error over populations and generations and billions of years, might not actually be able to "stumble upon" a configuration of cells and chemicals and electrical impulses or patterns that could give rise to an immaterial manifestation of consciousness coupled to the brain as a "tranceiver" between sensory/motor signals and the "ghost in the machine"?

For a hint of what this might be like, see Radio emerges from the electronic soup.

Researchers had used the principle of evolution (technically a "genetic algorithm") to try to evolve an oscillating circuit in a programmable array of transistors. (An oscillating circuit is one which generates and outputs a signal in the form of a sine wave.) It worked, sort of -- in the end the circuit evolved into one that output a sine wave, but instead of generating the oscillations itself, they discovered that it had evolved into a radio receiver that was picking up and relaying an oscillating signal from a nearby piece of electronics. This is actually rather a "creative" solution.

The relevance to the current discussion is that despite being in no way "directed" towards that solution by the researchers (indeed, they hadn't even thought of it when they were setting up the run), evolution had managed to stumble upon enough of a rudimentary radio circuit that it was able to "sense" the existence of a sine wave signal from "out there" (beyond the boundaries of the experiment itself) and develop a "hook up" to the "otherworldly signal" by refining the radio link and strengthening the reception of the desired waveform.

This is the sort of process I have in mind when I talk about evolution finding an organic way to "hook up" life to some "ethereal spirit" realm if indeed there is one and such a thing is necessary for consciousness/mind/soul/whatever you want to call it.

Of course, it could be a lot simpler than that -- mind/spirit/whatever may just be an emergent property of physical processes. Again, though, evolution would be able to "find" the combination of physical conditions which would enable this to take place. Evolution is *extremely* resourceful. (For several examples, see: Genetic Algorithms and Evolutionary Computation). In simple terms, it's the world's most massively parallel and gigantic game of trial-and-error. Every year it tries countless trillions of alternative possibilities. It's no surprise that it's constantly discovering new functional combinations of the components of life.