system
A chat on 4chan
human
Firstly I would say that consciousness does not belong exclusively to the human being. When you come home from a long day and start petting your dog he will be overjoyed to see you, and if you scold him for misbehaving he will express shame and sadness. The dog doesn't have language but he is definitely able to communicate when he wants to go out or when he wants food. These expressions of emotion and communication are genuine expressions of consciousness, a lesser form than our own but still legitimate. I suggest that consciousness is a spectrum of intelligence with human beings at the apex. Secondly, the purpose of consciousness, (specifically human consciousness) if it can be said to have any teleology, is to apprehend the world around it, to dissolve observable phenomena in the acid of language and symbols and to parse via nomenclature so as to make intelligible from one node to another. If the purpose of a tree is to grow towards the light, the purpose of consciousness is to grow in comprehension, eventually recusing upon itself to know itself, which is the unique ability of the human being. In a sense consciousness is engaged in a perpetual act of creation, to conceptualize disparate forms out of the unified whole; to make God asunder until finally coalescing via reason and articulation back into singularity.
>To hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature
gpt
This may have been short sighted, for consciousness not only apprehends existing forms but generates new ones through creative and artistic mediums. It's possible the purpose of consciousness is to engage in creative acts which generate new forms