Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)
&quot;Conscious states include states of perceptual experience, bodily sensation, mental imagery, emotional experience, occurrent thought, and more. There is something it is like to see a vivid green, to feel a sharp pain, to visualize the Eiffel tower, to feel a deep regret, and to think that one is late. Each of these states has a phenomenal character, with phenomenal properties (or qualia) characterizing what it is like to be in the state.&quot;<p>...<p>&quot;Here, the task is not to explain behavioral and cognitive functions: even once one has an explanation of all the relevant functions in the vicinity of consciousness — discrimination, integration, access, report, control — there may still remain a further question: why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?&quot;<p>-- I&#x27;m not getting why this is suppose to be &quot;hard&quot;. Any information processing system would have internal processes, ones that reflect current and past input, &quot;raw&quot; and suitably modified. A sophisticated information processing system could be expected to have observations on its internal processes too - just a server might have logs, processed logs and what-not.<p>I mean, all of this is important to <i>us</i> because we are it. Any autonomous system would be more concerned with its internal processes than random things. So for such a thing, a brain or even a self-driving car, it&#x27;s internal processes have a unique place - inside of its memory.<p>&quot; Why do not these processes take place &quot;in the dark,&quot; without any accompanying states of experience? This is the central mystery of consciousness.&quot;<p>-- Because each information processing system only processes its own information? It only &quot;sees&quot; its input, not some other system&#x27;s input.<p>Of course, I&#x27;d say that such reasoning seems plausible because humans have a strong tendency to project our experiences on other human beings and to imagine other people having our experiences and vice-verse. So we experience only our input (rather tautologically) but imagine others having our experiences, imagine others imagining us having their experiences and so-reflexively via &quot;mirror neurons&quot; and such.<p>But beyond that I think it seems &quot;hard&quot; because we value these experiences so highly. Having it all be banal and obvious seems to devalue it. And that&#x27;s about it.