It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

Consider probing a midlevel mobile phone at some hundred contacts. You might be convinced to have a thorough account of the physical reality yet still no idea of (and no way to know) whats going on.

To the problem of qualia.. I think it's the mechanism of the brain to default-name recurring patterns, being part of a simplification/compression process, without which reasoning (computing) or reasonably storing experiences would be impossible. I guess visual qualia like color and shape have to be the first things the brain learns and attaches "default" symbols to. Consider other basic qualia too, like to be saturated, to feel warm and then higher qualia that build on these like to feel loved or accepted in a social community.

It's difficult to argue how there could be a fundamental truth to qualia. But consider that there'd be no difference in our communication, even if your red is attached to a symbol signified by 8NCYUW6D0H5C (lets just assume this) while my red is encoded as being GAUTP1P6YUUZ (those patterns obviously have to be encoded as frequency patterns as we perceive close colors as similar without computational overhead). Eventually it will turn out, qualia from person to person are encoded quite similar, as we are genetically so similar. But consider also synaesthetia. Wrt animals, it WOULD feel strange to be a bat or any other animal as some of their sensory apparatus is so different.

To this, author makes a good point: "Today, we do not have an exhaustive external account, but this is not the same as having proof that no such account is possible."

I imagine consciousness as 'theater mode' of the perceiving mind. As such it seems to be one part of the brain that integrates all sensory inputs into one Multimodal Experience Stream™.

As to TFA.. - I'm by no means up to date to the current affairs of the consciousness debate, but - is there really a "fierce debate [...] raging"?

Check out Joscha Bach who argues consciousness is an illusion. Looking for some material to back up, I hit on this text. Flying over it I already find it more enlightening than the posted article, so I post it here (without guarantee):

https://medium.com/@mbonsign/consciousness-as-illusion-explo...

Some (citated) citations from it:

"The simulation becomes “more real than real” in our experience because it constitutes the entirety of our conscious access to ourselves and the world (Metzinger, 2003; Seth, 2021)."

"This perspective doesn’t diminish the richness or importance of conscious experience. On the contrary, it highlights the remarkable complexity and sophistication of the processes that generate our subjective experience. The constructed nature of consciousness isn’t a defect or limitation but a remarkable achievement — a way of making an unimaginably complex reality manageable for finite cognitive systems (Clark, 2016; Dennett, 2017)."

Please also note https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48180487 and consider joining my cult.

On the very last point: the conclusion that consciousness is thin, like a photograph, and the world thick -- follows from the most complete explanatory account of how consiousness works. The idea that there is no world, or that the world is a thin transcendental ego -- this abandons the project of offering an account of consiousness at all and ends up in incoherence.

Within consiousness I am presented with: what I cannot change (fixed perceptions), what I can change (eg., imagined perceptions). This duality is immanent to consiousness itself. The imagination can apprenend the fixed, ie., I can imagine scenarios that I could, in principle, see. So there is, immanent to consiousness already, a representational duality: I have both fixed perceptions that I cannot change, I have mutable perceptions (imaginations) that I can -- and my mutable perceptions are representations of my fixed perceptions.

All of the dynamics of the duality of the represented and representation, of the fixed/external and of the mutable/internal -- are already immanent to consiousness.

What remains to be explained is: why? The obvious answer is that the reason i have fixed perceptions is because they are caused by a world that they depict, and the reason I have variable/mutable perceptions is they are caused by me as I represent that world to myself. The duality immanent to consiousness is explained by the duality of the measured and measuring.

Even if you abandoned the world "external" and replace it with "fixed", you gain nothing. Everything which seems objectionable about this duality is already present. If you simply assert it, rather than explain it, your position is weaker because you've nothing to say.

The causal origin of our fixed perceptions is the world, which impacts our sensory organs, interacts with our bodies, and produces a thin perceptual surface to us which causally-directly depicts the world that we are in. These fixed perceptions are constructed by our bodies thru this process of activation, which we can call "measurement with post processing" ie., a kind of digital camera rather than a chemical one.

But in any case, to answer your final question: yes, the difference is that "consiousness" with this duality of the fixed and the variable, and their representational relationship, only makes sense if part of consciousness isnt being determined by consciousness. The need to say what determine it means the "consiousness is complete" option incoherent, if "consciouness" as a term comes to adopt all the properties it needs to explain the fixed perceptions, then you'll find consiousness becomes both the material and the mental -- and all you have done is empty the word of all its meaning

It may not ultimately be very useful to define consciousness so broadly as to include the tree whilst being willing to include mind's unalike our own.

It seems to me that it must necessarily include abstract computation inclusive of the self and volition separate from simple processes taking place in individual cells.

While it may be accurate to describe our own selves as the sum of our individual cells operations it is also possible to look at it top down as accurately.

I'm not sure that the tree grew towards the light or the mold towards moisture is as meaningful a concept as the monkey climbed the tree to eat the fruit and I don't think the distinction is the similarities to self.

I don't believe that the tree had within itself an organized center with a computed symbol for light or growth.

I also don't think it contains any ability to change the fixed computation represented by the system of it's cells or to arrive at different speculative computation of past or future.