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by ThrustVectoring 3797 days ago
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.
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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.

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).

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?