Quantum consciousness...

[The Grand Nudger]

My interest is whether there is a non-arbitrary cut-line between consciousness and non-consciousness.  In a way, it seems like consciousness with no content would be something like the sound of one hand clapping-- it's a nonsense idea.  If so, and I think this may be your view, the content IS the consciousness.  If so, that has definite philosophical implications-- in particular, that wherever certain kinds of processing happen, there must be consciousness.

Personally, I don't think there is.  I suspect that there' a line between "consciousness as we possess it" -whatever that is- and the stuff that everything else does...but the -as we possess it- line is arbitrary, in a meaningful sense, even if it's meaningful in a descriptive or categorical sense.  

As for remembering "what it's like" to be deep asleep, that's the $64,000 question and could answer many questions and settle many of our past points of debate about consciousness.  We know enough about memory to know that memory involves that processing happens in a certain way-- if it doesn't, there's no memory of something, but that doesn't necessarily mean there was no consciousness.  My grandmother, for example, remembers pretty much nothing, ever, because of senile dementia.  But the rest of us can see that she's experiencing: I don't get the sense that she's a p-zombie.

Some maintain that we have no memory at all.  The author of Matthildas paper, for example.

I often have the sense, even when awoken out of very deep sleep, that there was "something" there, like a kind of colorless light or something, and that something is very intangible.  Now, that could just be a superstitious vestige, or something to do with brain activity as I wake up.  But my own sense is that there's definitely something there onto which ideas and sensations are "projected," and that this is much deeper than my ideas, my world view, etc. or even anything I associate with my sense of self.

I would agree. Obviously, I suspect that our minds are computational systems...but the thing that our mind arises from was something else long before it was that....and it never stopped being what it was, even if it does other stuff now.