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The Hard Problem of Experience

tbd. see: Current summary article notes.pdf

Components

Consciousness is split out into the following components:

  • Conscious Feedback Control Loop - required in order to govern high-level thought
  • Mechanics - what are the physical mechanisms that define and create the 3 other components
  • Experiential Content - what data do we experience
  • Thing that Experiences - this is the only remaining fundamental question

Putting it all together

Explain experience of consciousness in terms of:

  • senses,
  • sense labelling
  • mental model
  • integration
  • meta-thought events,

Properties of Experience

Properties:

  1. Content of experience controlled by mechanistic principles
  2. Experience is mostly passive - it could be hypothetically removed with very minimal impact on data processing
  3. Experience is active in just one way: the data is modified to identify exactly which data was experienced
  4. Experience is gated: it can be enabled/disabled (as happens during sleep), and the process that governs that is not included in the content of experience, nor is it under direct conscious control.

(tbd: properties also discussed in [[Awareness of Thought is not the mystery]], and in [[The analogy of the Thalamic symbiote]])

Content

One of the most important distinctions here is that the content of experience can be explained entirely via mechanistic principles.

Content of experience is largely made up of streams of data with each having three components of information:

  • raw-ish data
  • context labels - what was the source of the data?
  • meaning - what interpretation is added to the raw input data?

The list of experienced senses is something like this:

  • touch
  • taste
  • sight
  • sound
  • smell
  • conscious feedback loop - summary of current state of working-memory
  • proprioception - mental model of body
  • mental model of mind

For the usual 5 senses, the list above is the internal versions, that are only loosely based on the external senses and are often re-purposed for other internal data. eg: imagination, memory of past visuals.

(tbd: discussed in more detail within An Examination of executive function in context of visceral loop.pdf)

Thing that Experiences

The remaining properties of experience are hard to define. But they stem from one simple analogy: that we experience our raw and pre-processed external and internal senses as if we are a separate organism that more or less passively receives those inputs. There appears to be a well-defined junction, and our experience is defined entirely by the data that passes over that junction.

Issues

Arbitrary why we observe some data flowing through the system and not others.

Also

tbd. Copy in discussion (probably on Evernote) about possible explanation of what defines the arbitrary set of data that forms the ‘Content’ of conscious experience.