Plasticity allows for such phenomena as 'acting despite the odds' and the evolutionary boon of the capability for spontaneous insight. Finally, no description of consciousness would be complete without some explanation and description of emotions. Emotions remain a great mystery to some, but I feel that they can be explained. As an evolutionary achievement, the motivational force of emotions is outstanding. Life forms, in order to compete and survive, have to operate teleologically, with evolutionarily - delineated goals such as to produce offspring, to survive in the short term, and to preserve one's species genes in the long term.
Emotions seem to be the phenomenological instantiation of the instinct of goal - direction.
Anger can be thought of as a hardening of the determination to achieve a goal, as a phenomenon experienced during the course of trying to meet that goal. Any emotion I can think of can be placed somewhere within this frame, and complex emotional states, such as what are known as 'mixed emotions,' are easily addressed when one considers the possibility of several motivational forces acting concurrently. We can have many goals at one time. Connectionism' as a theory of mental computation not only fits in very well with our current knowledge of the brain's physiology, but it also satisfies the philosophy that needless and non-efficient mental use would have been eliminated by natural selection. It certainly is more biologically efficient than the cognitivist belief that thoughts are manifested in sentences and propositions.