Maybe I'm a p-zombie then, because I just don't get it.

I've spent hours upon hours thinking about thinking and observing my own thought processes and I don't see anything that couldn't be explained scientifically.

For starters:

- Why is there something rather than nothing?

- Does a universe with no one in it to observe it count as something or nothing?

Then, imagine we're building an AI and want to know whether it's reached our level or not:

- How can we determine whether the AI experiences qualia the same (or similar) way we do, and isn't lying?

- Where to draw the line between conscious being and computer?

How do you know if the people to your left or right experience sensations the same way you do?

When they look at the sky does their mind paint the sky with the same color?

False. It's unfalsifiable. There is no experiment possible that you can set up to answer these questions, any more than you can construct an experiment to prove whether there is a God.

Why am I me and not you? Why am I not everyone? Am I everyone? Is consciousness an illusion? Is consciousness specific to an individual or do we all start with a 'base consciousness' that evolves with age? What is the chemical, physical or biological process responsible for consciousness? Does consciousness exist on an atomic level? Why do electrons appear to be conscious? Why can't we quantify it? Can we transfer it? Do trees or fungi have consciousness? Why or why not? What's the minimal requirement for consciousness? Is constitutive panpsychism real? Is consciousness a latent property of the universe?

Etc.

One must explain how the jump from quantities to qualities works.

Some people use 100% of the brain from time to time. When they do, it's called an epileptic seizure.

Other periods of high brain utilization we call a migraine.

I’m quite firmly in the “do not feel the incongruity” camp.

What I'm about to say might make no sense at all, but I seem to remember (or at least think I do, it might be a false memory arising from thinking too much about it) slowly gaining consciousness in early childhood.

I have a birthmark on the back of my hand and some of my earliest memories are triggered by noticing it and realizing I’m a separate being from other people and can influence my actions, stop being a mere observer of my body running on “autopilot”.

I have only passing knowledge of lucid dreaming, but from what I’ve read I’d say becoming a lucid dreamer is not at all dissimilar to developing consciousness in childhood. So maybe that’s a potential avenue for consciousness research.

Yeah that's a pretty common experience actually. There are a lot of memes on tiktok and twitter joking about "gaining consciousness" as a child. I think a lot of people remember moments as young children where they first truly felt like real separate beings.

I think a lot discussion around consciousness focuses too much on the binary (e.g. either you have it or you don't), but I like to think of consciousness as a spectrum, with organisms falling into various points along that spectrum. Your take fits nicely into that picture I think.

This is precisely one of the reasons I prefer attention schema theory as an explanation of consciousness. It actually has a progressive build up, with each individual stage conferring an advantage while also leading to the next stage. Evolution does not like big-bang progression. And it's also very hard to explain big-bang progression in multiple, drastically-unrelated species -- such as humans and octopuses.

Attention schema instead builds gradually. It starts with selective signal processing, advancing to body schema, then to attention schema, then to social schema (modeling other's bodies and attention).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/how-cons...