Consciousness

[Alan V]

Sure, consciousness is complicated, the same with the human brain, and the same with the human body overall. And the same with a lot of other things in this world.

But there is one aspect of what we are labeling "consciousness" that appears to have a whole other layer of complexity, and it's the one to do with phenomenal awareness.

All these other aspects, as complicated as they may be, are relatively easy to come up with [at least plausible] theoretical/scientific explanations for. Even if neuroscience were still sort of in its infancy, we have already been able to unearth various mechanisms underlying these aspects, and if we haven't yet, we can at least conceptualize potential mechanisms to account for these aspects without needing to invoke something mystical. We can "reverse engineer" these aspects, so to speak, to the underlying physical/biological processes. 

We don't currently have this same luxury when it comes to phenomenological experience, though. The mechanistic explanation for this continues to elude us, even conceptually. Because the experience is nothing like other physical objects/processes we observe or study. It seems to not be physical and yet not be abstract either. When I feel an intense pain, it doesn't feel abstract, it feels real. And it's not real like a physical object is real or a physical process is real, it's real in some different manner. And it feels so contrary to materialism that some have even gone so far to argue it must be an illusion, that we must be mistaken about the one thing that we thought we infallibly knew existed.

This was my answer to that issue in another discussion.  

I think we have misconceptualized the problem as one belonging in consciousness studies when it is one belonging in evolutionary studies.  The human brain is a kluge, made of one system evolved on top of another.  Yet we can be aware of inputs from those earlier-evolved systems, as well as of the more abstract information-processing issues of more recently evolved parts of our brains.