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> That is, it's possible that we don't actually "feel" anything, and our impression that we are is just the story that our self-model comes up to explain

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?

> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

I don't think it's correct to call this an external experience. It's an experience about will and desire and direct control of the body - what can be more internal than that?

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".

The experience is internal, the body (the limb that's missing) is external to the experience. The confabulatory experience of "I don't want to move" is an internal experience and cannot itself be an illusion, it's simply an incorrect assessment of the actual state of the body.

Sure, the limb is external. But the experience "I don't want to move" is not wrong because the limb is actually missing, it is wrong because I did actually want to move. "I" did the exact same thing as every time I try to move (i.e. the brain sent the exact same signals to the limb).

Sure, none of what you said there would lead to the conclusion that the "experience is not something that really happens," though it's also possible there's a just a failure of communication here and I'm not understanding what you meant.

So what would it mean for us to not really have sensations of color, sound, etc? People can be wrong about some of their experiences, but those would be called illusions or hallucinations, not lack of experience. Illusions and hallucinations are themselves kinds of experiences, even if the experiences are faulty. You can dream about all sorts of ridiculous things, but it would be very odd to use that to claim that you don't actually experience dreaming.

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 definitely seems like aspects of conscious experience are just more parts of the world model, e.g. we experience having a continual visual view of the world through our eyes, like watching a movie, but we know that's not what is actually happening physically.

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.

Speaking in the context of thinkers like Harris this is the reason why awareness is differentiated from consciousness. Consciousness is the ability to grasp the world "out there". Awareness is the blank canvas where consciousness is experienced. The analogy here is a movie projected onto a movie screen. Consciousness is the movie being played. The screen is the blank space of experience where the movie is projected. I think the confusion is there is no logically consistent differentiation of concepts like intelligence, consciousness, awareness in the sciences and they end up being used interchangeably.

Thanks, the distinction between awareness and consciousness is definitely something I've overlooked. I tend to think of them interchangeably.

> 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.

Also an armchair philosopher and I enjoy thinking about these things a lot. The theory you've described is the one that seems to have the most explanatory power.

Andy Clark's "Surfing Uncertainty-Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind" is a book-length exploration of this idea. Highly recommend.