Christianity is heading for a full allegorization

[emjay]

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I'm not sure I understand what phenomenological consciousness is supposed to be, frankly. How does 'consciousness of seeing red' differ from 'seeing red'? I just don't see a difference.
Perhaps the closest I can come is with certain optical illusions, where you have a single image and it 'flips' back and forth, possible with some control. I would imagine that each 'image' would be a different 'phenomenological experience', right? And we know the difference is just how the brain goes back and forth between 'interpretations'. is there something more to it?

1) 'seeing red' is the phenomenal aspect... consisting of let's say at the very least, the perception/illusion of an self/observor, and the experience of perceiving a colour in our visual field
2) the physical events of the environment interacting with our sense organs, in this case light interacting with the eyes, and the physical changes that causes in the neurons of the brain, is the physical/neural aspect.

It is my opinion that you can at least in theory have (2) without (1) and that in that case there would be no difference in the behaviour of the organism than if it had both (1) and (2)... and that such a being without (1) would be a philosophical zombie. I don't know how else I can say it.

So I see 'seeing red', as in the phenomenal experience of 'seeing red' as the superfluous aspect; without it, the brain would, in my opinion, still receive the same sensory inputs, still process it in exactly the same way, and still have all the same behavioural outputs and neural representations of its internal state data. Again, I don't know how to clarify my position any more than that.

In a sense that purely physical processing of (2)... which is non-localised, ie distributed, both in time and space, could be considered a low level description of a certain brain state, and at a higher, more abstract level, a description of information, rather than just data... ie for instance the difference between the physical bits storing a value in a register in a computer, and the useful variable name that holds it. I don't dispute any of that... and have no problem seeing the value of looking at things at different levels of description, but at the same time I don't believe this equates to (1).

Also, where we're using the word 'awareness', it's not intuitive at all for me to consider that as anything other than its most obvious sense, of the mental experience we all have of well, awareness... of experiencing mental phenomena, such as seeing red. Any other meaning I think is a stretch. So though the physical data processing in the above paragraph and the higher level abstract information it represents does in some sense represent the state of the organism in it's totality, and thus could loosely be said to include its awareness of the environment in some sense, I still don't think that equates to either (1) or what is normally meant by awareness.

So here is a related question: how do I know whether or not I am a zombie?

Well I would say, if you experience anything then you're not a PZ... because a PZ just does not experience, full stop. So if you have any kind of mental experience... of the unity, continuity, sense of self, experience of time and changing perceptions etc... then you're not a PZ.

Maybe what I 'think' is 'conscious experience' isn't *actually* conscious experience and is, instead, what is being described as 'in the dark'. How can *I* tell? I certainly see things and hear sounds and feel touch. But that would be true whether or not I have phenomenological experiences, right? I would still be aware of those things. And I would be aware of being aware of them.

This part I dispute. I would say if you have phenomenal consciousness then you see things, hear sounds, and feel touch, but if you do not have phenomenal consciousness, as in you do not experience anything, full stop, then though you neurally represent and process all the same data related to those perceptions, you do not actually experience them... so you do not see, hear, or touch; you have the internal/physical representations of that experience, but do not actually experience it. Likewise for awareness... depends how you're defining awareness, but for the regular use of the term, which I'd say is just that sense of self (whether that's an illusion or not... topic for another discussion maybe) that experiences phenomena; that is what I'd call awareness.... so I don't think you can have awareness, in that sense, without phenomenal experiences. There can be awareness in an abstract informational sense or raw physical data sense, but it's not the same thing as awareness in the sense of a first person construct of a self, experiencing anything, full stop.

So what is the difference between awareness (as in information) and phenomenal consciousness?

See further up for my thoughts on that.

When it is described as 'shiny', that is a visual perception and I can distinguish shiny things from non-shiny things. But so would a zombie. So saying that consciousness is 'shiny' is a metaphor, right? But what is it a metaphor of, precisely?

Well I'm not using the same metaphor as Grandizer... of shiny... but to translate that into what I've been saying, 'in the dark' I think would translate to 'does not experience, full stop' and 'shiny' would translate to 'experiences anything... ie experiences, full stop'.