[Nevermark]

For obvious survival reasons we evolved to have sensory/cognitive access to our own activity, self-monitoring, and self-modeling ourselves.

The self-modeling, is in such a tight loop, it melds "ourselves" and our model of ourselves, our thinking and choices, and experience of our thinking and choices, into one component.

Like you can't analyze half a wheel of a bicycle and be talking about the same thing.

This awareness, increased modeling, control, feedback loop has tightened up over many stages. Just a few:

1. The body-sense loop

2. The internalized-environment-model loop

3. The body-internal-function loop

4. The body-internal-model loop

5. The emotional-cognitive loop

6. And finally, the tightest loop of all, our high-level cognitive activity, experienced as feedback directly, our self-model, and our self-direction, all merged into one thing.

We literally spend almost all day, every day, thinking about ourselves, in terms of our inner self.

That is consciousness. Rich self awareness, a merger of self-model and self-direction, and all in service of understanding and managing ourselves. Hw we can leverage our greatest tool, our self-directable mind, its habits, views, and behavior.

This wasn't an accident. A happy side-effect of our brains. It is a biologically evolved focusing of our highest-level behavior, with tight feedback, constant self-modeling and continuous focus on our inner status as motivation and most privileged object of our control. It has been ruthlessly optimized for, for a very long time.

[runeks]

> We literally spend almost all day, every day, thinking about ourselves, in terms of our inner self.

> That is consciousness.

So thinking is consciousness?

Can there be consciousness without content? E.g. can I just be conscious of being conscious? If so, consciousness cannot be defined as the thing(s) we're conscious of.

[layer8]

> Can there be consciousness without content? E.g. can I just be conscious of being conscious?

Being conscious of being conscious means that there is content. You are conscious of something.

It’s a bit like a Gödel statement that quotes itself, that is a statement about itself. It doesn’t mean that it has no content.

Thinking isn’t consciousness. Consciousness doesn’t require thinking, it only requires perception. The perception of a process of perception within the same mind might constitute consciousness.

[Nevermark]

I don’t think thinking is consciousness, but I don’t see how consciousness operates without thinking.

Consciousness might feel like it’s an isolatable experience, but everything we experience is a result of processing it. Pause a brain and it isn’t experiencing anything,

We can be conscious without overt reasoning, but not without thinking. Thinking about ourselves and the experience is a basic component of the self-awareness in consciousness.

[runeks]

> Consciousness doesn’t require thinking, it only requires perception.

Could we imagine a human being that is conscious but has no sensory input nor any occurring thoughts but is still conscious?

[ludwik]

I think this is exactly it, but let me ask another question (which is not rhetorical, I really don't know). Does the fact that one can describe what consciousness is and where it came from in humans help them to detect it in non-human and/or non-biological entities?

[Nevermark]

That is a really good point. Yes, I think function is diagnosis on this.

Constant self-awareness, self-experience, self-focus, self-management, and self-improvement of one's own self (mind), is going to be an adaptive behavior for anything intelligent with resources to leverage. Whether truly independent, or highly motivated to serve others. The mind is the greatest tool.

I think that is more than simply a good functional definition of consciousness. How could all that integration and self-integration not be conscious.