[ben_w]

> What I am saying is that we emphatically know things about the physical processes that (almost certainly) generate consciousness

I'm prepared to believe that people who aren't me know such things, but last time I asked a PhD in brain research about this (a while ago now), they seemed to disagree.

At least, assuming we're talking about the same usage of the word "consciousness" here — when it's defined as "opposite of unconscious" then sure we have drugs to turn that off, and also separately with the non-overlapping definition of "opposite of autonomous or reflexive"…

…but the weird thing where I have an experience rather than just producing responses to stimuli? If anyone knows about that, my search engine bubble hides it from me.

[visarga]

Came across an intriguing paper recently. It postulated that consciousness might emerge when an organism can form a predictive simulation of both its body and surroundings, an approach akin to model-based reinforcement learning (RL). This is distinctly different from merely reacting to the environment, a characteristic of model-free RL.

> What insects can tell us about the origins of consciousness

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1520084113

Maybe consciousness is the self&world-simulator.