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Kawoomba comments on Timeless Identity - Less Wrong
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Hypothesis: consciousness is what a physical interaction feels like from the inside.
Importantly, it is a property of the interacting system, which can have various degrees of coherence - a different concept than quantum coherence, which I am still developing: something along the lines of negative-entropic complexity. There is therefore a deep correlation between negentropy and consciousness. Random thermodynamic motion in a gas is about as minimum-conscious as you can get (lots of random interactions, but all short lived and decoherent). A rock is slightly more conscious due to its crystalline structure, but probably leads a rather boring existence (by our standards, at least). And so on, all the way up to the very negentropic primate brain which experiences a high degree of coherent experience that we call “consciousness” or “self.”
I know this sounds like making thinking an ontologically basic concept. It's rather the reverse - I am building the experience of thinking up from physical phenomenon: consciousness is the experience of organized physical interactions. But I'm not yet convinced of it either. If you throw out the concept of coherent interaction (what I have been calling computation continuity), then it does reduce to causal continuity. But causal continuity does have it's problems which make me suspect it as not being the final, ultimate answer...
How do you explain the existence of the phenomenon of "feeling like" and of "experience"?
I agree that the grandparent has circumvented addressing the crux of the matter, however I feel (heh) that the notion of "explain" often comes with unrealistic expectations. It bears remembering that we merely describe relationships as succinctly as possible, then that description is the "explanation".
While we would e.g. expect/hope for there to be some non-contradictory set of descriptions applying to both gravity and quantum phenomena (for which we'd eat a large complexity penalty, since complex but accurate descriptions always beat out simple but inaccurate descriptions; Occam's Razor applies only to choosing among fitting/not yet falsified descriptions), as soon as we've found some pinned-down description in some precise language, there's no guarantee -- or strictly speaking, need -- of an even simpler explanation.
A world running according to currently en-vogue physics, plus a box which cannot be described as an extension of said physics, but only in some other way, could in fact be fully explained, with no further explanans for the explanandum.
It seems pretty straightforward to note that there's no way to "derive" phenomena such as "feeling like" in the current physics framework, except of course to describe which states of matters/energy correspond to which qualia.
Such a description could be the explanation, with nothing further to be explained:
If it empirically turned out that a specific kind matter needs to be arranged in the specific pattern of a vertebrate brain to correlate to qualia, that would "explain" consciousness. If it turned out (as we all expect) that the pattern alone sufficies, then certain classes of instantiated algorithms (regardless of the hardware/wetware) would be conscious. Regardless, either description (if it turned out to be empirically sound) would be the explanation.
I also wonder, what could any answer within the current physics framework possibly look like, other than an asterisk behind the equations with the addendum of "values n1 ... nk for parameters p1 ... pk correlate with qualia x"?