Natural selection is universal and undirected, so it is meaningless to wonder “why” it was “content to evolve” anything.

This sort of determinism has been a problem for Dawkins going back to the late chapters of The Selfish Gene.

"why" in this context is not about human intent, it's colloquial shorthand for "what is the fitness advantage if you can make intelligence without it?"

I've been pondering this one for a while. In a purely mechanistic universe, why does consciousness as we experience it even exist?

With respect to the Dawkins quote: Claude doesn't survive we just built it, like yesterday, the Claude that Dawkins is interacting with might be replaced next month because it can't survive.

I believe that consciousness works as a layer of systems. The lowest systems react fastest but to a small, well known set of stimuli. More unexpected stimuli trigger higher layers until really unexpected things trigger the slowest, full conscious layer for deep decision making. Hence why you can feel like you're on autopilot when you're doing something you're experienced in such as driving. It's resllt a system designed to cope with a world that changes too fast to get engrained in our genes.

Also read Blindsight

Most species are zombies. Bugs or bees for example. The fact they are such reliable zombies makes the fruit fly or nematode compelling model systems for research.

Intelligence is costly but the fitness gains could be enormous. For example, no other apes have colonized the world as we have. At the same time intelligence is no guarantee of success as we’ve seen. Our extinct hominid cousins are evidence for this. They were intelligent and it did not seem to make a difference in their species success.

Probably by accident, right? Each step toward consciousness wasn’t enough of a disability to reduce reproduction. Not everything has to be a clear cut advantage out the gate, and not every feature that proves advantageous appears fully formed out of nowhere.

well, I am a P-zombie.

(for context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie and https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/)