Seeing red

[Angrboda]

I think it leaves untouched the question of what it is that's experiencing these heightened connections as heightened connections.

Yeah. Basically getting caught up in the generality of that idea one thing I forgot is that ultimately neurons are only useful in as much as they can complete a circuit... they're like billions of little switches. So if you have say one input layer, two hidden layers, and an output layer then even if you have a very rich self-sustaining neural representation that makes it to say layer three, if it doesn't make it to the output layer... if nothing gets triggered there then I'd guess it doesn't contribute to the whole system? It's like a dead end? Or did you mean something else?

I'd say the more basic question is why are these output stages experienced as consciousness. I think it takes more than just neural nets to give rise to consciousness. Neural nets of a specific configuration, perhaps, but something more.