Word: conscious
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...declares its own untestability at the outset. There is nothing Steve could do or say under any circumstances that would provide the slightest grounds for either dismissing or confirming the reality of his experience. There could not be an objective test that distinguished a clever robot from a really conscious person...
...Consciousness is an emergent property and not a process in and of itself. Our cognitive capacities, memories, dreams, etc., reflect distributed processes throughout the brain. The thousand conscious moments we have in a given day reflect one of our networks being "up for duty." When it finishes, the next one pops up, and the pipe organ--like device plays its tune all day long. What makes emergent human consciousness so vibrant is that the human pipe organ has lots of tunes to play, whereas the rat's has few. And the more we know, the richer the concert...
There appears to be what Wittgenstein called an "unbridgeable gulf" between the brain and the conscious mind. The paradox of the mind-body problem is that the explanatory causes of consciousness in the brain are not discoverable by inspecting the brain, and introspection cannot reveal the rootedness of consciousness in brain tissue. Our modes of knowing about the mind-brain nexus don't home in on the glue that binds the two together...
This natural knowledge amounts to the emergence of a basic self, and its presence changes the status of the brain's sensorimotor maps from nonconscious mental patterns to that of conscious mental images. Constructed knowledge is a solution to the problem of consciousness. It does not require a homunculus in the control room of the mind and is not scientifically harder to imagine than the long march from genes to culture...
...That sprint, however brief, was a respite from an otherwise self-conscious existence. I regularly bare my soul to thousands online. But it wasn’t until I bared everything else that I made peace with my harshest critic: myself...