My impressions about this were strongly influenced by Sam Harris's Waking Up book and app.
We already know that our self-model can be entirely wrong about our feelings. People with paralyzed or even missing limbs often believe that they just don't want to move that limb at first. So, they think they are having one experience, but they are wrong about their own internal experience: in fact, they are not moving that limb because they can't. And there are many other similar examples of people being wrong about their own intenal experiences, typically but not exclusively because of some illness.
So, it's possible that our internal experiences are in fact only a model in which one part of our brain interprets the actions of other parts of our brain, often retroactively.
Note: I'm not claiming this is the truth or silly things like "if you believe in science you have to believe this". It's just another cocktail philosopher's story of what consciousness might be. Other stories are just as plausible, and just as consistent with the little we do know in this area.
Where I get confused though is this sentence: "...the story that our self-model comes up to explain (and help predict) our reactions to ourselves". What is "ourselves" here? That implies some observer that the self-model is explaining things to.
That is a good point, language is pretty important in these things. I just meant "ourselves" as the overall brain/mind. That is, the self-model component just feeds these models into the planning component, so that the planning component can decide the next actions to take.
Andy Clark's "Surfing Uncertainty-Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind" is a book-length exploration of this idea. Highly recommend.
I think it's rather the opposite, they aren't wrong about their internal experience, it's just that their internal experience doesn't match the objective reality of their body (which in this sense is external).
I think it is indeed entirely possible that our self-model can fool us about the realities of various situations, even those with our own body/emotions/etc, but I'm not sure how one could then derive the conclusion that the experience doesn't exist. It would just be instead that the experience is rather inaccurate/confabulated.
It's not like an optical illusion, where you think you are misinterpreting an external stimulus. This is a situation where you are trying to control a limb, not getting any reply, and concluding that "you don't want to move" instead of "I can't move".
If our internal experiences are the result of self-interpreting an internal model, that doesn't make the experiences go away. It means there's something about that activity which causes subjectivity.
It seems to me that you are trying to banish things from the existence by a reductionism based exorcism ritual.
If we know a structure of some phenomenon it doesn't mean the phenomenon doesn't exist. We know that life is a chemistry, and there is no life in periodic table. But it is not a reason to conclude, that life doesn't exist.
If my feelings come into existence as a result of a complex information processing, it doesn't mean my feelings do not exist or are not real.
If "I" is just a retroactively written story, then what? Does it mean "I" is not real?
It depends what you mean by "is real". Of course in some sense it is still real, just like triangles are real. But it's not real in the same sense that rivers or rocks are real.
The relevance in this context is that it gets rid of some privileged position for consciousness. If this explanation I gave were true (I have no reason to believe it is!), then there is no problem in reconciling qualia with materialism. Qualia are just an aspect of the modeled "I", not a raw experience that can't be explained. P-zombies are all that exists.
Rivers and rocks are less real than consciousness. Our minds can work with mental objects only, these objects often are built as an images of something outside of our minds. Most of the time images have nothing in common with underlying reality of an imaged phenomenon: for example we need to remind ourselves that you cannot cross the same river twice, because our model is a static object, while really a river is a dynamic process of H2O molecules falling out of sky and then rolling down to an ocean.
But our consciousness is the model of ourselves. The object (me) and its model (me consciousness) are much closer, there is no long chain of causes-effects passing information from external river to neurons. And moreover consciousness is a pure magic among other images: I can believe as hard as I can that river must be made of milk, and it will not change the river. But if I believe something about myself, it leads to real changes. Doesn't it mean that "I" is more real than any river?
Or... scratch that. I can agree with you we have confused naive understanding of consciousness mixing causes and effects. But I'm not sure that the rest is as simple as you describe. I'm sure a dualist will find a way to explain qualia as something that can't be reproduced in AI.
These things are never easy and they never have a definite answer.
I feel like the matrix is about the eject me btw.
Thanx, I'm looking for Harris' books right now.
I still enjoy the process though, which perhaps also doesn't require consciousness, yet here I am.
It's very much possible that what we would call consciousness can only exist in certain types of minds that have a particular level of intelligence, but also a particular structure.
Of course, it's also possible that you're right and the two are entirely separate, and that consciousness doesn't require intelligence (and possibly vice-versa).
For time to exist some sort of motion is needed, including either internal motion like the perception of breathing or a heartbeat or a train of thought or external ones like a clock or a change of color from red to blue.
It's all pure speculation because we have no way of assessing it outside of our own frame of reference. E.g. I see you in another answer saying that "the fact is that all kinds of state changes happen", but we don't know if any state changes ever happen.
We have no way of telling a dynamic universe apart from a static one where we're all just suspended in a single unchanging moment.
We can choose to handwave a lot of this away ordinarily because as long as the experience is reasonably consistent it makes sense to assume it is objectively real, because we have nothing better. It doesn't matter if the world didn't exist a second ago when e.g. considering whether gravity work, because it appears as if it did.
But when trying to determine the nature of consciousness we run headlong into the fact our observation of consciousness is direct only in the case of ourself, and even then heavily limited. We have no direct measure that puts us in a position to prove consciousness even in other people. We can show that within our perceived world we can measure brain activity that correlates to though, but not whether that reflects merely the operation of an automata, or the existence of consciousness, or if there is a distinction at all.
As such, it's meaningless to suggest we have a way of saying much about the limitations of consciousness at all.
I am curious to know why you think so. What would you say about repeatably observable causality, in that case?
Maybe time is a spatial dimension, and there are infinite moments of consciousness fixed in the same spatial location with no time passing.
Consider how you'd tell if a drawing is an individual drawing or a frame from a cartoon if all you have to go by is that single frame. You can argue that the drawing hints convincingly at motion, but that does not require that this motion has taken place.
Or consider a trace of a simulation, sliced and diced into snapshots of individual moments. We can argue that it's unlikely any entities in such snapshots would have consciousness, but if we're arguing on the basis that we appear to experience the motion of time, we'd equally make that argument if we were wrong about consciousness and indeed locked in snapshots of individual moments. We can even construct simulations where individual parts look causally connected but where the existence of one calculated frame tells us nothing about whether any individual other frames have even ever been instantiated (e.g. imagine a very complex function over time, where only punctuated values have ever been calculated).
I'm not saying I believe that is our situation - I'm saying we can't distinguish between that and an infinite set of other possible options, because "from the inside" there is an infinite set of possibilities that could all look the same from our vantage point. We can debate which possibilities seem more likely, but they will always be speculation as long as we're locked inside the asylum, so to speak...
Incidentally, this is an argument for a materialistic view of the universe, not against it, on the basis that absent a way of "peeking out" and seeing our situation from the outside, it's meaningless to treat the world as anything but what we measure and perceive - it doesn't matter whether or not this world is what it seems like to us or not as long as it is the only view we have of it. We just can't say if it is some inherently true objective view of the universe, and most likely it won't make any difference to us.
It only makes a difference when we tinker with philosophy around the edges, like these conversations about whether what we experience can tell us anything about the experience of other entities.
Is it possible to have perception in a static environment? It seems like perception requires flux of some sort.
Clarification: meaning the machinery of the perceiver must have flux, otherwise it's not perception, it's just static state.
We so far have no way of splitting perception or conscience down in slices of ever shorter moments to see where it stops being whatever it is and becomes something "inert", but even if we did, we would not know whether that was an inherent limitation of objective reality or of our subjective reality and whether those two are the same or not.
BTW experienced mediators apperently can experience no time and no space, no idea how that tastes like.
Sure, they might feel so, but the fact is that all kinds of state changes happen, so time goes on.
If we look at our advancing world models in things like self driving cars, when would we consider them conscious by our own rules? It has a sensor network that keeps track of it's own internal states. It has external sensors that monitor the external world and adjust it's internal state. The internal state attempts to predict future states and take actions to avoid negative outcomes.
So when does this loop become something we consider consciousness?