The article is devoted to the analysis of the opinion widespread in the scientifi c community about the decisive adaptive role of consciousness in the process of natural selection. Hypotheses about the functions of consciousness as a central element of the information processing mechanism and the development of a control eff ect on the behavior of the organism are considered. The conclusion is formulated according to which such functions traditionally ascribed to consciousness, such as coordinating the work of highly specialized “intellectual” subsystems of the brain and providing them with quick access to informational resources of memory, providing second-order intentions and regulating complex behavior, can be successfully implemented by “automatic brains” carrying out processing information coming from outside and forming the most adequate model of behavior exclusively at the “hardware” level. All this may testify in favor of the hypothesis of the epiphenomenal nature of consciousness and the absence of the infl uence of consciousness on the processes of biological evolution. Certain aspects of this problem are considered from the position of the hypothesis about the possibility of endowing subjective states in general and consciousness, as the most complex form of realizing subjective states, in particular, with the status of a fundamental property of matter, irreducible to any of the already known properties.