General Consciousness is defined by two qualities:
- Binding: All the information that’s part of a conscious experience is experienced at once, and from a single perspective
- Boundary: Any processing of the information is excluded from the conscious experience, it happens before or after the information is experienced.
This kind of structure has been described as the Binding and Boundary problems of consciousness because it’s not clear how a physical system could allow for both of these things to be true. For an overview of the literature and history of the Binding and Boundary problems please see this excellent paper: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2023.1233119/full
What this means is that we can identify a conscious experience without reference to qualia or emotions or feelings, the qualities of the way it’s experienced. We can describe what information is experienced, when and how, and these should be criteria that are describable. Therefore we shouldn’t run in to issues like The Inverted Spectrum (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-inverted/) or Solipsism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism) or Panpsychism (https://iep.utm.edu/panpsych). Information has to be transmitted over some physical channel or medium to a place where consciousness happens, at that area there’s a boundary where all the information that makes it within the boundary is experienced at once, and from a single perspective. And all information, or processing of the information, that happens outside the boundary isn’t experienced.
This would require that consciousness be a physical process that has measurable inputs and outputs. But it wouldn’t require that consciousness have any specific qualia or types of experiences.
Let’s use vision as an example. The information for vision is created when light hits our retinas. Rods and cone cells are excited by different wavelengths of lights, and trigger nerve pulses that travel through our optic nerves and into and through our brain. We don’t experience this directly, but we can imagine what it might be like, to experience the individual cones being excited and them firing off. It would be lots of individual points of data rising and falling in complex patterns, or just as random noise. But that’s not what consciousness is like. Instead the nerve pulses are processed through many intermediate layers, picking our colors and edges and motion and combining 2d data in to 3d data, etc. And then at some point that information crosses a boundary and we experience it consciously. At this point the experience has the above two qualities that define it as consciousness. It’s all experienced at once, from a single perspective, and the processing that happened is excluded. The particular qualities we actually experience, the colors the shape and structure, etc., aren’t defining characteristics of consciousness. They might be the same from person to person, or between different animals or between a person and a machine, or they could be completely different. What defines them all as conscious experience is the structure of the experience.
After we experience the information from our eyes, which is also experienced at the same time and from the same perspective as all the other information from every other sense, our brains continue to process the information. It’s used to create actions and responses, etc. We’re not conscious of that processing either, it’s outside the boundary that defines our consciousness. For example we’re not aware of the individual muscle impulses that move our legs so we can walk or move our arms and hands to catch a ball, or our tongue to help us speak.
But we know that our conscious experience must create outputs that can be integrated in to that later processing. We know because we can talk about the concrete structure of our conscious experience that are recognizable to other people. We can also describe some qualia, like pain and pleasure, that have a definite “direction” and can’t be arbitrarily flipped like an inverted spectrum of colors, and have a distinct impact on our choices.
We haven’t yet been able to identify what part of our brains allow for this kind of boundary and binding structure, or how the conscious experience creates output that’s integrated in to our actions. But it seems clear that these must be physical processes that will be possible to detect and measure in someway. They must be physical because they interact with physical parts of our brains in ways that change observable and measurable physical effects we can already see, like nerve pulses that cause our actions. And this structure of binding and boundary around the system should create patterns in the data that would be recognizable and we should be able to isolate the parts of our brains that are responsible for consciousness, with sufficient ability to measure and model neural activity.