I think the part “below the quote” is where I said some things about consciousness. Glad you liked them.
I think the part “above the quote” is where I answered your question about how I think perceptual functions came about. And I did leave out what I think is the evidence for this.
I think there are two kinds of evidence for the evolution of perceptual functions. Both are related to the feasibility of these functions coming about ontogenetically – during the course of individual development. First, this seems infeasible because the the neural nets that implement perceptual functions must be rather complex, particularly those that produce perceptual analogs of higher level variables, such as programs, principles and system concepts. It seems very unlikely to me that a random process of reorganizing neural connections would be able to regularly come up with neural networks that could perceive all the different types of complex variables that virtually all humans are able to perceive and control by the time they are 15 or 16 years old.
Second, even if it could be shown that perceptual functions of arbitrary complexity can develop relatively quickly, it still seems very improbable that the same types of perceptual functions would always develop in all individuals. And if PCT is right (which still has to be thoroughly tested, of course, but so far, so good), then all humans perceive the world in terms of the same types of perceptual variables.
I think it would be better to discuss this in Discourse dysfunction topic area.