BTW, all the ways in which consciousness seems to be set up as a "user interface" (perhaps not the best analogy, but it gets at the core idea) certainly seems to imply a need to prompt us to behave in ways conducive to survival and reproduction.

From a systems perspective, to the question:
>Can a system be more or less self-determining in how it responds to an environment?
And:
>Can memory and computation (rough proxies for thought presumably) direct responses to the environment?

Are unequivocally, yes. This is how we are able to sketch out what it would take to make a successful organism or synthetic lifeform. Obviously, the Hard Problem and metaphysical questions about what makes something more or less unified as a whole such that it is a "system" loom large here, but the evidence is not against relative self-determination. And if thought emerges from "information processing," (computational theory of mind, IIT, etc.) then it can absolutely play a key role in behavior, such that "I asked my wife to marry here because of who she is and because I loved her," is true. I think these reductive formal attempts to define consciousness are fundamentally broken, based on a bad metaphysics and understanding of information, but even in their own terms this works fine. The only thing that is ruled out is some sort of question begging "magical faculty" that, by definition (i.e., violating the "laws of physics") is impossible. If the "laws of physics" are based on observation then this is essentially demanding that observations of freedom be contrary to all observations, which is absurd.

Now I'll drop a vastly superior philosophy of mind text, since, might as well.