The best one-sentence description I've read of how we think is "humans, if given the choice, would prefer to act as context specific pattern recognizers rather than attempting to calculate or optimize."

We're free to coast on simple pattern matching and automatic processing 90% of the time. Consciousness is only there because it's monitoring any deviation of action from intention. If something goes wrong and our learned rules and basic instincts aren't working, consciousness has to step in and try to cobble a solution together on the fly (usually badly).

Consciousness is a failure mode. He was trusted with root access, and he's spent the last hundred thousand years or so abusing it.