[dwd]

When someone outs themself as a panpsychist I find myself reading everything with a large degree of skepticism.

"The first step is defining what "consciousness" is!"

This is a compression I've been working on. There's a lot in it, but happy to expand on where I was going with it:

"Consciousness is the local projection of a world model recursively resolving its frontier with constraints. Awareness is the transient peak of constructive interference among competing resolutions, propagating only as far as the medium permits. The self is the story that awareness later tells about itself."

Qualia is just the experience of this process from the inside. That's all there really needs to be to it. As to why "something it is to be" emerges, I'd lean on Friston and the Free Energy Principle. It's also Friston's embodied perception-action loop where a thermostat fails the consciousness test.