What is it about consciousness that you think is a problem for science? What is it that it does that makes you think it can't be the product of a material process?
It's not about what consciousness
does - it is about what my consciousness IS". The problem here is that this is an experience that I can't explain to you. You seem not to recognise what I'm talking about, or you have a way of explaining your experience of existence as reflective information processing. That expression is to me utterly external, representational, modular, mathematical (Ken Wilber calls it 3rd-person or 'it'-language) and it does not bridge (in my comprehension, though I accept I may be missing something here) the gap to the 1st person, "I" that simply IS and knows that it is.
Now, you present your unconscious-matter model of how a person has the illusion of a self as if it were easy to see - like anyone should just have to hear it and they'd go "Oh yeah, of course". So maybe you're extremely smart, you and your breed of neo-zombies. But most people hear Descartes' "I think therefore I am" and go "Oh yeah" - not that they might get the detailed nuances - but it reminds them of their most absolutely undeniable reality - they ARE, they exist, they are alive.
Now, you say that all that can be caused by a machine. But I say that another theory gets my attention these days and explains more to me, but, unfortunately, I don't know how to explain it to you - even how to begin, other than to say that it reassesses the assumption that my subjective experience is a product of matter - in other words it says "What if we stop the first (or even the second) assumptions of scientific materialism?" It might involve reconsidering a dualism with mind and matter, or a monism where Mind is primary. It experiments, however, from that first experiential place of knowing I AM, and sees what else it might discover. There is a rich literature on just what people discover beyond that, which often leads to similar proposals as yours - there is the no-self of Buddhism, for instance. However, there are many Buddhisms, not one, and a lot of spiritual philosophies, and many of them include a concept of Cosmic Consciousness, or the idea that the All, the sum total of the Universe, is not dead matter, but Divine, and that that simple I AM is, were we to delve into it enough, the same thing (Atman is Brahman; Consciousness is God).
It is hard to talk about these things here, because they don't
happen in representational modelling it-language; mostly, they just
are in an intuitive inner space that I imagine you have not entered (and I don't mean any disrespect by that). There isn't a functional map I can put in front of us and point to. I can't tell you about this journey in English. It's an inward journey and there is a point where you have to leave explanations behind (just resign yourself to poetry and irrational prose) in order to continue. It is a continuation of the same journey that you were on as a materialist earlier, of conscientiousness, truthfulness. I'm sorry the irrationality of the ideas irritates rationalists here, and maybe I shouldn't even come here and tell you about the theories I can't tell you about rationally. But I'm moved to because this other dimension of knowledge feels so important.
It was around Descartes' time that things went one-sided and the inner, the mind got separated from the science. Science concerned itself only with what it could observe of the material world, and left the nature of mind to the Church, and in that split something got lost, which is the reality of the Subject, a reality that, of course, in our increasingly rationalist, materialist and technologically successful world, fewer and fewer take seriously...at least it was so until the intermittent reawakening of the 60s and 70s...and now, as postmodernism finds a more mature voice.
I think that your programmatic models of consciousness are symptomatic of the exterior-view trying to explain the bits it left behind - the interior experience of mind - and convincing itself that it has a workable scheme because it looks good on paper.
Why is postmodernism important? Well, because with it we began to realise that there is a big problem with language, that it isn't simply representational, and science relies on abstraction and symbolism, representation, modelling, simply language. Why are language and all forms of representation a problem - because they are not the real world and because they are contextual and because they actually originate 'internally' in a human mind and are projected onto or matched with patterns in the outside world.
Thus, science, even with its best mathematical models, really measures its own imaginary constructs, not real objects. I gave the chair-continuum as an example thought-experiment. How much can you chop off a chair before you stop calling it a chair? The boiling point of water - what exactly is 'boiling', when water molecules are evaporating and condensing variably at a wide range of temps and pressures? Fundamental particles - these are just words representing models representing realities that no-one can be sure of. The more you contemplate reality (and the science we've already got, because it does give useful data) the more it seems that we have to say, like the mystic, that there is something very strange and fluid going on, but we don't really know what.
All it is, is reflective information processing. As I said earlier, I can build a circuit that does that with about a hundred transistors (and a similar number of passive components). Given that neurons are substantially more complex than a transistor, you'd need rather few of those, plausibly less than twenty.
You would sneer at anyone proposing that they have psychic powers and giving this kind of 'evidence'. I wonder what James Randi would make of it. He would presumably require substantial demonstration of consciousness from your circuit. Just telling me that, in your opinion, you can build a circuit that is 'conscious' demonstrates to me that you either have absolutely no idea of the normal human experience of subjectivity - the 'witness space' - the sense of selfhood - or you are deliberately merging these ideas in your mind and hoping the gap will go away.
What, after all, does consciousness do? We perceive things, and we act. We can remember perceptions and actions. We can think about perceptions and actions, and remember those thoughts. And we can think about those thoughts.
So the components are:
Perception
Action
Memory
Thought
The last one is the big one, but it's not all that complicated once you understand that all four components feed into it, and it feeds out into all four. It's both referential and self-referential.
(Which is why Nick's notion that you can think your way out of the materially-based mind is completely wrong. There are no layers; it's a circle.)
Again, it's an IS, not a DO. Your list doesn't define consciousness to me. It is a flatland description of the possible contents of consciousness. If you experience what Nick and I have, you would know that consciousness can be empty, 'bare attention', which is when you recognise it's peculiar quality of AMness. Again, from your mindset you say Nick can't think his way out of the circle, when he said he experienced not BEING his thoughts. I couldn't mistake what he was saying because I have had the same experience. Blows your mind. The first time I had it I was about 16 and I didn't go there again for years. You see, the other thing about all this is it's really quite scary, not the soft squishy lovely place we're accused of retreating into, where anything can be real. It's waking up from symbols to REALITY. It's like switching off the TV. And even then doubt doesn't go away. I've seen through the representation, the abstraction, the symbolic living, the change humanity made when we invented language and became self-conscious that is mythologised in such stories as the Fall from Grace, but I still wonder if what is left is reality when it's so hard to say much about it or do things with it. It sucks, in fact, most of the time. But once a delusion is burst, you can't go back. Once you see the magic eye picture, or get heliocentrism, it just is.
Hope that helps
John
