Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dispute that "experience" is something that requires a special explanation. The feeling of what you call "experience" is just something that you sense inside your brain. It is just content, data, like thoughts and other perceptions are as well. You are thinking about it. You are thinking about how you feel about it. You have perceptions about your thinking of how you feel about it. Is your cognition able to process…
It seems that you are thinking that perceptions lead to experience, and then nothing else. My view is that perceptions lead to internal processing that in turn is itself perceived by our cognition, in addition to the original perceptions By this definition, which I don't necessarily disagree with, wouldn't a single level of reflection/introspection have to qualify as consciousness? If we decide that a simple light se…
I also don’t think consciousness is black and white, there is certainly a spectrum. To us, qualia have complex, multi-faceted and multi-layered textures, in line with what we can cognitively perceive and process, and they trigger just-as-complex associations and emotions. It seems to me that this richness is a large part of what makes consciousness wondrous.
I don’t think a Roomba is observing its own internal processing. A program that debugs/profiles its own execution and uses those data as inputs of its main functions, or a neural network that feeds back the changing weights of its edges as additional inputs for itself, would maybe come closer to asking that question.
As an analogy, does a simple light sensor qualify as “seeing”? “Seeing” on the level of a mammal, with object and motion recognition and building an internal spacial model of what it sees, along with predicting what will happen in the next moments based on what it sees, is certainly on a whole other level.