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Awareness of Thought is not the mystery

With a better understanding that conscious feedback evolved as a necessary component to control the chaotic nature of a neural network based high level state machine, it becomes apparent that this is not the crux of the mystery of conscious experience. The real mystery is why we experience anything at all.

We introduced conscious feedback (CF) to explain experience. In doing so, we realised that CF is just another sense. In fact, it appears that the CF sense is managed exactly the same as other senses; even to the point that it is shut off during sleep in the same way that other senses are.

So, back to the original question: why should we have experience of some brain data flows and not others? I posit that experience is tied to our senses.

Senses

Experience occurs for all our senses. This is particularly evident from sleep and during the brief period of waking, where we experience our senses being re-enabled. For example, during that period we sometimes experience our hearing coming back online. Without the hearing sense enabled, there is just less data to experience.

It’s harder to judge the impact of the CF sense being cut off. We may still experience without it, but we have no memory of it. A simpler interpretation is that our experience shuts down at the same time as CF, so perhaps CF is tied to it in some way.

In another example, we experience external touch localised to the place where it occurs. This requires the senses to be passed through our mental model of body before we experience it. So experience is limited in scope to senses after they have been pre-processed.

Our sense pre-processing, processing, mental state, and emotions all control the content of what we experience. And our senses limit the scope of experience. But something else defines how and why we experience that data.

Properties of Experience

So experience is somehow more than what is already explained through a mechanistic model of the human brain. What properties does experience have that are not already explained through that mechanistic model?

Maybe something like this:

• Continuous - not step by step events
• Presence - experience is present at the time of data processing, it cannot be done offline and then injected as a result
• Limited scope - only some things lead to experience
• Mirroring - experience exactly mirrors the data passing through a particular catchment area within the brain
• Measured - experience is like an act of taking a measurement of data at a particular point

(tbd: properties also discussed in [[The Hard Problem of Experience]]