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> But our consciousness goes beyond simple self-awareness: having a theory of mind is a step beyond (and is realizing that others have a theory of mind a step beyond that?)

That [and this] whole space [of considerations, here] appears to be fraught with circularities like this:

Step 1. Draw a distinction between consciousness and meta-consciousness.

Step 2. "From what vantage point, and with what 'machinery' do we make a distinction?"

Step 3. Go back to Step 1.

> .. that our ability to think about the issue is constrained by our language.

I think I agree, otherwise I'm tempted to think that we would have already arrived, trivially, at some clearer kind of agreement about it.

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To be clear, I don't think there is an infinite recursion here, but I do think that consciousness, as we experience it, is several steps beyond merely responding to stimuli.

It just crossed my mind that perhaps 'our ability to think about the issue is constrained by our language' and '[consciousness'] workings being inaccessible to introspection' are the same thing.

> .. that perhaps 'our ability to think about the issue is constrained by our language' and '[consciousness] workings being inaccessible to introspection' are the same thing.

I like to think about it that way, but it makes the problem feel intractable.

The problem is that we want to describe consciousness as "that thing that allows an organism to describe consciousness as 'that thing that allows an organism to describe consciousness as ´that thing that allows an organism to describe consciousness as [...]´'"

Exactly. That's why we keep going in circles when talking about these things, and why people have been repeating themselves for hundreds of years, yet the problem still seems fresh.

I wish I had something more substantive to add, but I have really come to think of this as a fundamental limit to thinking.

It's sort of analogous to starting with a set of axioms, then trying to derive explanations for these axioms from them.

This sounds defeatist, but I have yet to read a good argument for why trying to explain the "hard problem" is anything else than that. I guess you could see this in a sort of mystical light and build something spiritual around it, too...

"Consciousness is the ability of an organism to predict the future"

The problem of looking at human consciousness is similar to someone that knows little about computer processors pulling apart an I7 and trying to figure meaningful things about what is going on inside. Without knowing the history of processor design, there will be huge information gaps on why some parts work the way they do.

That said, I believe consciousness is just world modeling, which explains the recursion problem you run into, a good model can simulate itself (nested Turing machines). As creatures evolved the ones that didn't just react, but could predict properly had better survival outcomes. Predictive models competed with each other and the 'best' ones survived, until after millions of years one branch of these models became complex enough to self reference itself.

>The problem of looking at human consciousness is similar to someone that knows little about computer processors pulling apart an I7 and trying to figure meaningful things about what is going on inside. Without knowing the history of processor design, there will be huge information gaps on why some parts work the way they do.

I don't think the analogy is adequate. A processor is an object - it "objects" to all of us. It appears to have an existence independent of the thing that recognizes it as such. When we embark on an empirical investigation of something, we make a distinction between the scientific observer and the scientific object. We come to an agreement about the boundaries of the object. This does not appear to be the case if you want to call consciousness "that special [condition, or process, or property, or pattern, etc.] of being a scientific observer" (which we would ideally want because it seems to encapsulate all those special things that distinguish human beings from other organisms with nervous systems).

In that domain, we cannot make a distinction between subject and object. In order to even speak intelligibly about things, we must all draw the boundary of the thing we're talking about - but we are in the peculiar position of being the very act of drawing the boundary.

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