The Philosophy of Mind: Zombies, "radical emergence" and evidence of non-experiential

[The Grand Nudger]

In the theory, the attention schema provides the requisite information that allows the machine to make claims about consciousness. When the machine claims to be conscious of thing X – when it claims that it has a subjective awareness, or a mental possession, of thing X – the machine is using higher cognition to access an attention schema, and reporting the information therein.

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I think my issue is that qualia isn't considered elemental in a material view.  So either there's a critical mass of something (information, electric fields of a certain configuration, whatever) which suddenly spawns a quale, or there's an incremental process by which more complex systems have something more and more like qualia.

Maybe, yeah..in ast, they'd put the critical mass at the point of the reptilian brain.   

But qualia-gony (lol) is binary: either something is being experienced, or it isn't.  I cannot conceive that there is "more and more experienced."

Well, our own experiences have varying levels of richness; realism, hyper-realism, illusory.  We put this down to the relative amount or quality of sensory experience and in some cases a product of novel chemistry in the brain..but.."more and more experienced" may just be a term for richer and richer experience.  It may be that the comparative richness of one experiences produces distinct behavioral differences in it;s contextually "lesser" peer..even though they both experience.

I'll drop another quote..from the author of that theory...this time writing about it for the atlantic..I think you might enjoy it.

Consider an unlikely thought experiment. If you could somehow attach an external speech mechanism to a crocodile, and the speech mechanism had access to the information in that attention schema in the crocodile’s wulst, that technology-assisted crocodile might report, “I’ve got something intangible inside me. It’s not an eyeball or a head or an arm. It exists without substance. It’s my mental possession of things. It moves around from one set of items to another. When that mysterious process in me grasps hold of something, it allows me to understand, to remember, and to respond.”

The crocodile would be wrong, of course. Covert attention isn’t intangible. It has a physical basis, but that physical basis lies in the microscopic details of neurons, synapses, and signals. The brain has no need to know those details. The attention schema is therefore strategically vague. It depicts covert attention in a physically incoherent way, as a non-physical essence. And this, according to the theory, is the origin of consciousness. We say we have consciousness because deep in the brain, something quite primitive is computing that semi-magical self-description. Alas crocodiles can’t really talk. But in this theory, they’re likely to have at least a simple form of an attention schema.