Conciousness Delayed

I read in New Scientist recently something along the lines that, the impulse to move a finger is created somewhere in the brain a full seven seconds before the finger actually moves. It was something like that anyway. In any case it set me thinking.

It stands to reason that the signals or potentials around the brain take a finite time to be 'processed'. This processing is massively parallel and happens asynchronously. It would also seem reasonable that different pathways take different times to process. For example the auditory pathway may be quicker than the visual pathway, which has to handle greater and more complex information. But, in our concious mind things happen simultaneously. The sound of a plate smashing happens at the same instant you see it hit the ground. The only way this could happen is for the processing in the auditory pathway to be slowed down or delayed and then somehow synchronised with the results of the visual pathway.

This idea could be extended. Maybe our entire concious experience is delayed? By delay I don't mean micro seconds or seconds, but longer. How could this make sense? Surely, this concious experience is needed to in order to react in a timely manner to our environment? Maybe not.

It's obvious that a lot of what goes on in our bodies is ultimately out of the reach of conciousness. We cannot affect the functioning of our liver for example, by thinking about it. But what if everything were out of the reach of our conciousness? What if everything we did was simply driven unconciously. Then, the delayed conciousness wouldn't be so problematic. Instead it would be more like a replay of what just happened outside of conciousness. This severance of the equality of conciousness with reality, would allow the brain to take as long as it likes to create the concious experience, while still processing reality 'out there' in a timely manner.

So what's the point of conciousness? Do we need it? My guess is that it's something to do with social cohesion, language and identity within the group. In other words, consciousness allows us to report our internal world to others.