Conscious

You in there! Yes, the one that's calling out, 'You in there'. You know who I'm talking to, because it's you that's talking.

All this comes after reading Searle's The Rediscovery of the Mind in which he presents his solution to the Mind-Body problem: body creates mind; we just don't know how. How something objectively knowable (at least theoretically) can produce subjective experience is still a mystery, but that it does, he takes to be a fact.

What's interesting is that he describes consciousness as a kind of presentation of the world to an observer/participant, a subject. The appearance is the reality as far as consciousness is concerned. However it may have been generated, it's describable to but not experience-able by others.

This is the provocative part: what is it about experience of things that is more than just exact description of them? Surely, precise-down-to-the-smallest-detail third-person representation is just as good as, no, is actually the same as experience; that is, what we can experience adds nothing to it.

Nothing? If consciousness is the coherent perspective of a situated observer/participant (agent/patient) of something attended to because of its relevance, then consciousness adds relevance, mattering-ness, to the world Is that nothing?

Watched yesterday afternoon the movie The Theory of Everything about physicist Stephen Hawking and his first wife. There the problem of consciousness is highlighted: far-ranging, deep-probing thoughts in an unresponsive body. The product: concepts expressed in equations that describe the direst events of the universe. What does the experience of conceiving these thoughts add to the universe they depict? That is, is the universe richer for having been thought of? Is the observer/participant relevant to a full representation of all that is?

Searle deals with the problem of introspection thusly: (Listen, close, this is why I don't like to think about you inside much)  For most things, a clear distinction can be made between observer and observed. However, since consciousness is examining itself, no such clear line can be drawn; cue infinite regresses, distortions, carnival mirrors. So, you, this is the last I'll say it, are doing a fine job, but I won't dig into you to find out about myself. I'll reflect on my thoughts, perceptions, feelings and behaviors, but I won't try to the find the man behind the curtain of appearances. There's no one there, other than all of me.