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