Quantum consciousness...

[ignoramus]

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.

I would hazard a guess and say that our minds were the *same* going back to before we were even human. We were completely conscious, intelligent and self aware then
just like a 4 year old is today. It's just added experiences which reshape our thinking and attitude as we get older. I'd say most animals are the same -for their respective level of brain complexity.

With regard to whether consciousness is binary or not, remember that even with normal human beings who we all deem to be conscious, it's easy to see people acting in ways that they cannot easily explain. Whereas some people are far more conscious about why they act the way they do. After all this is primarily how therapy works. To make you see how previous experiences effect who you are now and the way you act.

Less developed animals will be influenced more by the stimuli that they sense directly.

As above, I find it hard to see the switch as a binary one. Nothing in natural evolution has these discreet binary states at any stage. Why would our natural consciousness.
It's all a million shades of slow evolutionary grey.