[ThrustVectoring]

I've got a very clear model for what consciousness is.

Let's start by looking at how brains work for something that is much easier to reason about - vision. Light hits the eye, and it activates a set of neurons that are wired up to the light receptors. There's further out neurons that are set up to catch certain higher-level patterns, like edge detection or objects headed directly toward the eye. Deeper and deeper these connections go, until you get something that you subjectively experience as "seeing". It's at this point that optical illusions work - flat images on paper that are designed to make the higher level visual pattern recognizers fire. At a very high level, how parts of the brain work is by activating based off the sensory data represented by the activation of other parts of the brain.

Just like detecting edges in your visual field was important in the ancestral environment, so was answering questions like "what did you do on the hunt?" with a good story. Just like there's a portion of the brain the constructs edges from lower-level visual sensation, there's a portion of the brain that constructs narratives from lots of different kinds of sensations. Furthermore, this narrative module has access to remembered narratives (since consistent stories are better ones) as another form of sense data.

That, in short, is what consciousness is - the brain making sensible stories out of the sense data it encounters, and making those stories available to the brain (including the story-making module, which is why you can make stories about the qualitative experience of story-making).

[zepto]

Although this might be a sensible way of looking at how the brain processes information, it doesn't address the hard problem of why there is a subjective experience.

[ThrustVectoring]

Err, it does if you mean what I think you mean by "subjective experience". There's subjective experience because the brain constructs a narrative about the sensory data it is getting (and that narrative is also part of the information it is processing). This is what subjective experience is. Why it exists is because people needed to tell stories in the ancestral environment.

[zepto]

It doesn't explain why that paricular representation is privileged as being experienced, as opposed to all of the other representations in the brain.

Simply declaring 'that's what subjective experience is' is not an explanation.

Another way of putting this is that you haven't explained why it's necessary that an autobiographical message passing system needs to experience itself, and what the threshold is for qualifying as such a system.

[ThrustVectoring]

It seems obvious to me - it's privileged because it's what's used to tell stories about your sensory data. It's very easy to identify with that part of yourself, but that's not the only way to go about things. One of the more common other ways is usually called "flow", where the sports-playing / problem-solving part of the mind is basically the entire thing that you're experiencing.

In other words, that representation is privileged because the environment often demands story-telling from you. In situations where it doesn't, you get very different experiences (like flow states, or long solo wilderness hikes).

[zepto]

So you seem to have just contradicted yourself. You said before that the storytelling experience is consciousness. Now you are saying there are other kinds of subjective experience that are also consciousness. Why are we conscious of them?