Conscious realism

"To a physicalist, the conscious-realist mind-body problem might appear to be a bait and switch that dodges hard and interesting questions: What is consciousness for ? When and how did it arise in evolution ? How does it now arise from brain activity ? Now, the switch from the ontology of physicalism to the ontology of conscious realism changes the relevant questions.  Consciousness is fundamental.  So to ask what consciousness is for is to ask why something exists rather than nothing.  To ask how consciousness arose in a physicalist evolution is mistaken. Instead we ask how the dynamics of conscious agents, when projected onto appropriate MUIs, yields current evolutionary theory as a special case.  To ask how consciousness arises from brain activity is also mistaken. Brains are complex icons representing heterarchies of interacting conscious agents.  So instead we ask how neurobiology serves as a user interface to such heterarchies. Conscious realism, it is true, dodges some tough mysteries posed by physicalism,  but it replaces them with new,  and equally engaging,
scientific problems.

Nobody explains everything. If you want to solve the mind-body problem you can take the physical as given and explain the genesis of conscious experience, or take conscious experience as given and explain the genesis of the physical.  Explaining the genesis of conscious experience from the physical has proved, so far, intractable. Explaining the genesis of the physical from conscious experience has proved quite feasible. This is good news:  We do not need a mutation that endows a new conceptual apparatus to transform the mind-body problem from a mystery to a routine scientific subject, we just need a change in the direction in which we seek an explanation.  We can start with a mathematically precise theory of conscious agents and their interactions.  We can, according to the norms of methodological naturalism, devise and test theories of how conscious agents construct physical objects and their properties,  even space and time themselves.  In the process we need relinquish no method or result of physicalist science, but instead we aim to exhibit each such result as a special case in a more comprehensive, conscious realist, framework."

http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/ConsciousRealism2.pdf