Is Consciousness a by-product of the human brain or is the brain and the rest of what we call reality, just a bunch of "heuristic concepts constructed from selected perceptual experiences" by our consciousness? This question is explored in a very short paper by Axel Randrup titled, Conscious Experience, Existence, Behavior: Significance of Consciousness. The paper also addresses the question of whether or not the experience of consciousness affects our behavior and, if it doesn't, what its significance might be. The topics of free will and language are also touched on briefly. If this all sounds a little wonky compared to other modern theories of consciousness, that's because it's based on a philosophy called Idealism - "mind over matter". Idealism is as old as Plato and some schools of idealism deny any existence of reality outside of the mind of the observer.