Consciousness

[Alan V]

In this post, I referred to consciousness as "abstract information processing."  To clarify, the brain processes information both consciously and unconsciously, as I made clear in this post in another discussion.  The difference is in how that information is processed, with consciousness employing a brain-wide strategy which can account, at least in part, for the hard problem of qualia.  Conscious access to the information being processed is necessary for it to qualify as qualia (subjective sensory perceptions), though qualia are a subset of what we can be conscious of.  We can also be conscious of our own abstract thoughts or memories, for other examples of conscious access.  

Looked at from the point of view of conscious access, qualia are just one variety of information which we then may or may not process further.  Conscious access can be considered the brain's selective focus on what it considers most important at any given moment. Interestingly, for qualia to even reach consciousness, they must be processed unconsciously before we can notice them. It seems likely, therefore, that some of the more distinctive characteristics of qualia, like color for instance, are in part the results of that unconscious processing. In that sense, qualia can be tackled by brain science, and are not just "givens" or brute facts.