This is the sense in which consciousness can be understood here as entrapment rather than triumph. The problem is not that awareness has no practical value. It has enormous practical value. It allows human beings to cooperate, communicate, invent, plan, build, remember, and transform their surroundings. The problem is that the same machinery can turn inward without limit. The mind can imagine its own death, then imagine the loss of those it loves, then imagine the future suffering that has not yet occurred, then construct questions about why any of it should happen. The nervous system that protects the organism from immediate danger can become capable of generating suffering in the absence of immediate danger simply because it can represent possibilities.