Patricia Churchland

     According to the great Austrian physicist,Erwin Schrodinger,consciousness is nothing more than the process of " learning how". This means that the the unconscious is "knowing how". He illustrates this principle in his famous book-What is life?- with an example. There was  a famous mathematician in Austria who came home one evening to atend a party in his house. He tells his wife that he will go to his room,change his clothes and rejoin them. But even after an hour after he left to change his clothes,he doesn't return.His concerned wife goes to his room to check out,only to find to her surprise that the lights are off and her husband is sleeping soundly. What had happened? The very act of taking off his clothes had trigerred in the mathematician a series of well-practised steps that ended with his going to  bed and sleeping.
   This example shows how if we keep repeating a fixed sequence of acions,it eventually goes out of our consciousness and becomes unconscious.Could it be that consciousness is nothing more than the ability to recognise variation,to be aware of something that is different from one's own experience?Could it also therefore be that conscious creatures represent the zone of evolution or the front-line of evolution or the process of "learning how" to do a thing?