I would love nothing more than to not be special, the only solutions that I can conceive of for the hard problem of conscience are ones that requires something other than the physical. Either there is a soul or conscience is just inherent to the universe(the whole everything has a conscience theory) neither of these is particularly satisfying to me if for no other reason than they are both unfalsifiable. I would love for there to be an available algorithm that my brain could compute that would spit out conscience.
But I don't see how, it seems intractable to me. The brain could theoretically do anything it does from information processing, problem solving, planning or even develop a theory of the mind without a conscience, it's computation all the way down. But why and goddamned how does a human brain go from perceiving and processing the visual information of red light hitting your eyes to "feeling" red, how does it "feel" anything at all, heck what is this "observer" that does all the "feeling" even made of? if you could break "him" down into constituent parts(theoretically computable sub-problems) at all that would be nice, it would be more progress than I've done over years of thinking about this bullshit problem.
The "observer" seems indivisible to me, heck it seems made of nothing at all, it just is. Sure it being indivisible might be an illusion made up by the brain, but, if so, it's an illusion that still needs to be fed to "something", and I haven't heard any working theories that I actually buy that explain how the brain comes up with that "something".
the other way of thinking about it is that we don't know if we share a sense of "red", aside from merely being consistent with other compatible nodes (other humans) in a network. the other node simply can distinguish "red" from "green" just like I can, but we don't know if they are perceiving that color the same way I am. whether it is a hardware difference in the rods, cones, other aspect of the eye, or computational aspect in the brain, we don't know.
your supposition still relies on their being a separate entity to imagine, quantify or figure out, when that is not necessary. a tribunal of processes is enough for this "observer" phenomenon.
But I don't see how, it seems intractable to me. The brain could theoretically do anything it does from information processing, problem solving, planning or even develop a theory of the mind without a conscience, it's computation all the way down. But why and goddamned how does a human brain go from perceiving and processing the visual information of red light hitting your eyes to "feeling" red, how does it "feel" anything at all, heck what is this "observer" that does all the "feeling" even made of? if you could break "him" down into constituent parts(theoretically computable sub-problems) at all that would be nice, it would be more progress than I've done over years of thinking about this bullshit problem.
The "observer" seems indivisible to me, heck it seems made of nothing at all, it just is. Sure it being indivisible might be an illusion made up by the brain, but, if so, it's an illusion that still needs to be fed to "something", and I haven't heard any working theories that I actually buy that explain how the brain comes up with that "something".