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PhilGoetz comments on Open Thread: January 2010 - Less Wrong
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Question for all of you: Is our subconscious conscious? That is, are parts of us conscious? "I" am the top-level consciousness thinking about what I'm typing right now. But all sorts of lower-level processes are going on below "my" consciousness. Are any of them themselves conscious? Do we have any way of predicting or testing whether they are?
Tononi's information-theoretic "information integration" measure (based on mutual information between components) could tell you "how conscious" a well-specified circuit was; but I regard it as an interesting correlate of processing power, without any demonstrated or even argued logical relationship to consciousness. Tononi has published a lot of papers on it - and they became more widely-cited when he started saying they were about consciousness instead of saying they were about information integration - but he didn't AFAIK make any arguments that the thing he measures with information integration has something to do with consciousness.
It's a very interesting question. I think it's pretty straight-forward that 'ourselves' is a composite of 'awarenesses' with non-overlapping mutual awareness.
Some data with respect to inebriation:
drunk people would pass a Turing test, but the next morning when events are recalled, it feels like someone else' experiences. But then when drunk again, the experiences again feel immediate.
when I lived in France, most of my socialization time was spent inebriated. For years thereafter, whenever I was intoxicated, I felt like it was more natural to speak in French than English. Even now, my French vocabulary is accessible after a glass of wine.
That is interesting, but not what I was trying to ask. I was trying to ask if there could be separate, smaller, less-complex, non-human consciousnesses inside every human, It seems plausible (not probable, plausible) that there are, and that we currently have no way of detecting whether that is the case.