Consciousness is a tricky subject, and most discussions go off track early on due to differing definitions of what consciousness is. For the sake of clarity, I want to start this post with a few exchanges from ChatGPT that frame the overall problem.
ChatGPT:
What is the hard problem of consciousness? The hard problem of consciousness is a concept in philosophy, particularly in the philosophy of mind. It refers to the challenge of explaining why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to the subjective experience of being. While the "easy problems" of consciousness involve understanding the mechanisms that allow us to perceive, think, and make decisions, the hard problem is concerned with why these processes are accompanied by conscious experience. In other words, the easy problems focus on the functional and computational aspects of consciousness, while the hard problem seeks to understand why these functions are associated with a subjective experience. It's a problem that has perplexed philosophers, neuroscientists, and thinkers across various fields, and there is no widely accepted solution to it.
What do you mean by subjective experiences? Subjective experiences refer to the personal and unique sensations, feelings, thoughts, and perceptions that an individual has. These experiences are subjective because they are specific to the individual and may differ greatly from one person to another. For example, the way you experience the taste of a particular food might be entirely different from how someone else experiences the same food. This difference extends to all sensory perceptions, emotions, and even thoughts. In the context of the hard problem of consciousness, the term emphasizes the deeply personal nature of conscious experience. While objective observations can be made about brain function and behavior, the subjective experience of consciousness remains elusive and is not something that can be directly measured or fully understood through external observation. It's the internal, first-person perspective that each of us has on our own mental life, and it's this aspect of consciousness that the hard problem seeks to explain.
My conjectured explanation:
Your brain assembles a model of reality based on sensory input and prior knowledge (genetic and experiential/learned). For example, you do not perceive a direct image of what you are seeing from your eyes, instead your brain creates a model image based on visual inputs: [There is blind spot in your eye behind your optic nerve that creates a blank spot, and your brain projects a modelled image over it. The optic image on the back of your eye is upside down, and your eyes are constantly scanning, yet the image in your mind is right side up and stable] Your brain creates a model of the reality around you and predicts what you expect to experience next while new sensory inputs update that model constantly as new information comes in. Your perception of reality is just that, a model.
Your brain can also use these same information processing systems to create internal models of knowledge that are not based on sensory input, but instead are completely abstract. These internal models are myriad, personal, creative and potentially infinite, as they do not need to be updated by sensory input. But they contain information that may comprise implicit and explicit knowledge that informs models of your sensory input. The influence of these personal models may explain qualia, such as how you perceive the color red. People may have different perceptions of the color red, but those perceptions tend to converge to some extent based on human interactions and constant model updating within the brain and between humans. That said, one cannot be certain of another person's subjective perception of something because they cannot share the exact same internal models of abstract knowledge (currently).
This is my rough conjecture, but I think I may need to clarify what I mean by the term model. Model, in the sense that I am using here, refers to an attempt to create an explanation about reality based on incoming sensory information, or an attempt to create an explanation about an abstract idea based on information from other abstract knowledge. In terms of sensory input, the best explanations allow us to navigate reality most effectively. In terms of abstract explanations generated independently of sensory information, rational (logically consistent) explanations may be more valuable in terms of gaining a deeper knowledge of reality, but abstract explanations could also represent any explanation or information however irrational or fanciful. In fact, irrational explanations are often attractive for various reasons and tend to get replicated and communicated to others frequently (Memes & Culture). Perhaps it is this ability to create these unbounded abstract explanations that is at the center of the perception of individual consciousness?
What I like about this conjecture is that I think it aligns with what Popperian/Deutsch epistemology has to say about how knowledge is formed and how we never directly observe reality. We only create useful (problem solving) explanations about it, that must be constantly error corrected. If my conjecture is on the right track, then replicating the algorithms and architecture of our brain/biology on computers should lead to conscious AGI's.
I think there are also ways this explanation can be extended to show how our unique and internally created abstract knowledge may influence the deep and implicit knowledge, which is autonomously being processed by our brains at all times. These autonomous algorithms are genetically programmed and often subconscious but they tie us intimately to our biological bodies and the surrounding environment in which we are immersed. Examples could include internal information processing of the bacterial changes in our gut or instinctive recognition of changes in the air we breathe and automatic reactions to these changes. While these information processing systems may be similar between humans, they way they are perceived (qualia) must be influenced by the uniqueness of our individual internal abstract models of knowledge.
Consciousness arguably leads to a sense of self, and the potential uniqueness of every mind's internal models of abstract information processing and lived experiences could be the source of this self.