Experiments done on corpus callosotomy patients [0] give us some very interesting insights on how consciousness works. IMO, these experiments strongly point towards consciousness being mostly, if not entirely, an illusion created by the brain.
Built from the same shaky foundation and shared desire for it to exist
One hit upside the head and you’re a completely different person. (Or dietary change with different microbacteria, or following heavy psychedelics use, etc…)
I am with you on this. Today's scientific debate about consciousness sounds a lot like the scientific debate about the human soul from a century ago.
We just want to be special so badly, meanwhile evidence keeps piling up indicating that we are not.
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".
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.