Hi, I wasn’t sure which of the posts was the one you wanted me to read. I read some of your posts and one that seemed to be a link to another site. Anyhoo, I’ll reply here.
As you say, there are many different perspectives on what consciousness is. Primarily, I think you have to decide on whether you take a materialistic stance: consciousness is the result of neural circuits in our brains, or the immaterial, philosophical stance which is that consciousness is something more than mere biology. I think you can get lost in the philosophy. It ties you up in knots. Surprisingly, neuroscience takes a much simpler, more direct approach.
For example, neuroscientist Nick Chater, in his book The Mind is Flat, says there is no evidence of any subconscious activity in the brain. He says it doesn’t exist. What we know as subconscious are simply deeper memories. All our thoughts pass through a single narrow bottleneck one at a time. We cannot multi-task, we simply switch between trains of thought. Our brain operates by pulling on stored memories. Everything we think we know is reinvented every time we recall it, based on the limitations of that current situation.
Non-materialists say that mere neural circuits cannot define the qualia of our experience: the redness of red, or the quality of a sunset, because they say this cannot be found in the material brain. Neuroscientists would disagree. They say they can now absolutely find the areas of the brain that cause these effects.
For me, I am more inclined to the neuroscience than the philosophy, which overcomplicates everything and clouds the science with ‘hard problems’ and philosophical zombies. What I do think is interesting however, is that science’s reductionist mechanisms of explaining everything by drilling deeper and deeper into them, doesn’t work in reverse. Philip W Anderson pointed out years ago that you can’t reconstruct the universe with elementary stuff. Something happens at each level of being and that is called emergence. A violin is one instrument, a trombone another. Put enough instruments together and you have an orchestra, but the sound of the orchestra changes according to the quantity and types of instruments you have. Consciousness is like that. All these individual neural circuits work to create their own signals, but when combined they manifest a symphony of thoughts that seem like magic, but aren’t. It is the wonderful illusion of consciousness.