Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

A framework for conceptual ideas is provided, but within this lengthy quantity of words, not much else is accomplished other than to admit that consiousness is safely a material reality.

A comment is provided criticizing the article as usual, not much else is accomplished other than unintentionally admitting that the commenter doesn't really understand the gigantic difficulty of the problem at hand.

"Conscious states include states of perceptual experience, bodily sensation, mental imagery, emotional experience, occurrent thought, and more. There is something it is like to see a vivid green, to feel a sharp pain, to visualize the Eiffel tower, to feel a deep regret, and to think that one is late. Each of these states has a phenomenal character, with phenomenal properties (or qualia) characterizing what it is like to be in the state."

...

"Here, the task is not to explain behavioral and cognitive functions: even once one has an explanation of all the relevant functions in the vicinity of consciousness — discrimination, integration, access, report, control — there may still remain a further question: why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?"

-- I'm not getting why this is suppose to be "hard". Any information processing system would have internal processes, ones that reflect current and past input, "raw" and suitably modified. A sophisticated information processing system could be expected to have observations on its internal processes too - just a server might have logs, processed logs and what-not.

I mean, all of this is important to us because we are it. Any autonomous system would be more concerned with its internal processes than random things. So for such a thing, a brain or even a self-driving car, it's internal processes have a unique place - inside of its memory.

" Why do not these processes take place "in the dark," without any accompanying states of experience? This is the central mystery of consciousness."

-- Because each information processing system only processes its own information? It only "sees" its input, not some other system's input.

Of course, I'd say that such reasoning seems plausible because humans have a strong tendency to project our experiences on other human beings and to imagine other people having our experiences and vice-verse. So we experience only our input (rather tautologically) but imagine others having our experiences, imagine others imagining us having their experiences and so-reflexively via "mirror neurons" and such.

But beyond that I think it seems "hard" because we value these experiences so highly. Having it all be banal and obvious seems to devalue it. And that's about it.

It's all begging the question that there's something special about some of those states, because we feel that they're special. That there's a 'subjective experience' attached which is more than just the information flow through the self-monitoring feedback loop that is our brain.