Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of &quot;explaining consciousness&quot;, instead spend their entire contents explaining some hypothesis involving meta-consciousness and then proceed to declare victory without ever touching consciousness itself. Jaynes&#x27; &quot;The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind&quot; is perhaps the most egregious offender.<p>This is especially troubling when you consider that meta-consciousness sells easily to the general public as &quot;the hard problem&quot; (our thorough use of it seemingly being a large part of what makes humans different, after all), while it&#x27;s likely that it&#x27;s more of an engineering problem after you&#x27;ve figured out base consciousness.<p>If there&#x27;s anything it is like to be a worm, THAT&#x27;S the hard problem. Implementing recursive phenomenal access seems like an undergraduate research project after that. Yet it&#x27;s most often the very thing we spend all our time focusing on. Frustrating. We need new words - or wider usage of existing ones.