What good is consciousness to machines?

The blog below is a peek at my own continuing thoughts to understand some terms and is written to evoke a discussion (in case!) or criticism!

Its been a while since I have been trying to define this term and recently my focus went over a paradigm shift. What use does it serve in defining 'consciousness'? The major reason for this thought make over was the "feeling" that the genesis of ideas are not "normally" in the realm of consciousness, but somewhere outside it. I don't know where ideas evolve, but from my own experiences, its certainly not inside consciousness. A conscious mind is just a verifier of ideas.

These thoughts lead me to another point. Mind/consciousness is just something that arises out of itself! Its hard to explain this weird self-referencing definition, but my efforts are underway! You can't define self-consciousness, since anything you use to define it is a matter of itself. Going by Godel-ian kind of explanations, you can't define it since you are inside your own consciousness when you try defining it and to define anything you need to use the materials outside itself!

Now, what are ideas? And how do they evolve? An idea, if you ask me, is a solution to a problem! In that sense, if you can find a problem, then that problem forms an antagonistic definition of an idea. When you think of solving a problem, unless you have already seen the solution and the solution is already a part of your consciousness, the computation happens elsewhere! I don't know where this happens, and thus I would call it a peripheral computation. Mind or consciousness has no control over this computation, except that it can feed in motivation, perseverance, concentration and guidance. When a solution arises out of some "random" firing of neurons, the mind acts as a verifier and checks the feasibility of the solution!

By the above argument, I am not discarding the possibility of the influence of existing knowledge in the finding of a solution. It certainly is guided, but my point is that consciousness has nothing to do with the finding of a solution or the thought process!

Now, what do I think, could be the after effect of such a conclusion? It means that self-consciousness is just an influencing parameter for a machine to solve problems, but is not a required parameter, but peripheral computation is... whatever that means ! Sometimes people call it "intuition" !!

Corollary to these thoughts:
1) If everything happens through peripheral computation and it is based on randomness, then why is the world so deterministic ? Why do people think alike in most of the situations, if everything is equally probable?

2) Randomness is just a shield over our inability to understand what lies beneath. Thus it is not random, but is something guided. In that sense, doesn't it mean that the origin of ideas is not random, which means that what I am thinking right now is not some random thought but is an after effect of a configuration which at any cost is unavoidable due to the last series of incidents! In such an extreme sense of completely mechanical self-awareness, is it required to do something special than the conventional things, in programming a machine to act like humans? Does the turing test make any sense in such a framework?

3) Though this question does not make any sense in this context, but am just curious to know the answer: "What could be the smallest computer program that is self aware"?