I agree with everything you're saying, but I think we just are referring to different things when we say consciousness. Take any qualia, and there are 2 sides to it: The object of it, and the subject of it. A red light is seen. In the seeing of it, there is the red light that is seen, and the seer who sees it.
What you are talking about is a black-box model of consciousness that only relies on external measurement. That is the correct scientific approach, but it comes nowhere close to counsciousness. Consider that maybe you are doing the same thing you think I'm doing. You have defined experience purely in terms of inputs and outputs. The experience is the input, the outputs are perception, volition, will, action, etc. But who's are the perception, volition, will etc? There is something that exists that gives essence to all these.
If this doesn't ring true at all, we can stop here. Objective language can only get so far when talking about the subject, unfortunately. Thanks for taking the time to reply.
I don’t just believe it exists, I know it exists, just like you know it exists, because you are conscious, because you are. Are you aware of your own existence? How can you know anything if you don’t know the knower?
There words may not make any sense to you right now, and that’s the limitation of objective language: we cannot point at the subjective without metaphor. But if this does sound like it rings a bell, lmk and we can talk more.
The observation of our own consciousness, that is its self recursive nature while we’re in a conscious state, is what makes consciousness special. With other observations we receive a stimulus, we perceive it, and we either act on it, or memorise it or forget it.
While we are doing so, we are aware that we had that perception, however we are also aware of our awareness of the perception.
So the observable property of consciousness is awareness of ‘consciousness awareness’ itself. This is not a paradox, we know how recursive functions work from computer science and mathematics so the concept of the recursivity of a process is logically coherent.
This makes our own consciousness the most observed property in human experience.
What you are talking about is a black-box model of consciousness that only relies on external measurement. That is the correct scientific approach, but it comes nowhere close to counsciousness. Consider that maybe you are doing the same thing you think I'm doing. You have defined experience purely in terms of inputs and outputs. The experience is the input, the outputs are perception, volition, will, action, etc. But who's are the perception, volition, will etc? There is something that exists that gives essence to all these.
If this doesn't ring true at all, we can stop here. Objective language can only get so far when talking about the subject, unfortunately. Thanks for taking the time to reply.