"Experience or qualia is what the process of simulation of reality feels like. Or to put it in another way: Conciousness is the process of simulating reality."
So I'd agree: If you reach a certain complexity in your inner model, qualia will "magically" emerge.
Another interesting point the article makes is the relation to the theory of mind. I wonder if you could even say, that we first had an inner model for the complex inner model of others and then, by applying that inner model on ourselves developed what we call conscioussness. You could probably assume that many animals are not able to take this final step and that this is what separates our consciousness from those of animals.
>> So I'd agree: If you reach a certain complexity in your inner model, qualia will "magically" emerge.
It's the only logical hypothesis we can have at the moment, but it doesn't mean it's the only solution. There could be properties of matter that maybe need to be simulated at a lower level that have to be present that we're not aware of.
If the brain simulates reality, why does our experience seem so 'atomic'? Like that simulation is so small in scale that our brain can basically simulate any visual field, hear any sound, feel any combination of textures on the skin and so on. There doesn't seem to be any abstraction in the simulation itself, but rather it is created by the nerves and retina on point of 'capture' in the sensory apparatus and then the brain is able to project it to the mind.
In other words it seems like each individual neuron / nerve is 'conscious' and then any arbitrary combination of activations in those neurons can create the subjective simulation of reality. I'm not sure if that's true from a scientific perspective or what the implications are if it's true, but this bottom-up simulation is far more powerful than a top-down one where details would be lost, and simulations usually start top-down, especially since the universe came first, and then our brain came later. It's basically inconceivable to us how a signaling system is conscious versus how it is not conscious but still receives signals, like a CCD chip in a camera can have a high resolution and show an accurate image of reality.
Do you mean very detailed? Have you read about the Fovea, and saccades and so on? You might be surprised to learn that the part of our retinas that can discern detail is very small - if you hold your thumb up at arms length the detailed part of your retina is about twice the width of your thumbnail. Everything else is lower resolution. And your eye jumps around in saccades - but you don't notice the constant movement.
But it doesn't seem like that does it? Essentially what we have here is an abstraction that we are completely unaware of most of the time.
So I put it to you that our consciousness does contain abstraction, but that abstraction is not obvious to us. Because what do we have to compare against?
Of course it seems super detailed to us.
Not necessarily, although I could argue you need detailed sensory organs to have a complex mental model but that's beside the point. What I meant by atomic was approximately what I said above - that it feels like individual nerves are conscious, like a mental field, and then you can fill that field with any arbitrary activation patterns and it will register in conscious experience. A lot of it won't activate _other_ things like emotions, memories, words and associations, but those aren't necessary for it be in conscious experience still.
I'm just struggling a bit with a 'computational' model of consciousness where there is this big abstraction process in the brain, while at the same time seeming so closely connected to the world and vast in possibilities. The way it seems to me is, the brain doesn't get sensory input of a chair, and then it has a preconceived notion of the chair in the brain, and then the brain projects the chair onto consciousness, but rather, the brain can see everything, and then with a more connected neural network, we can attach the 'chair stimuli' to other neural pathways, giving the chair a deeper meaning.
I know that after we have learned the meaning of some object in the world, _then_ the brain can have an automatic response to it, and that would be an abstraction that works in the higher areas of the brain, but we could still see the thing consciously before we were scared of it.
In that scenario consciousness comes first, and then meaning is built outward by connecting neural pathways together into networks of meaning, which is how I feel the world is anyway. In that scenario you'd need some kind of module that gives consciousness to all experience, and then abstraction is built in the neocortex or something after that.
Also to address your question - you are right, we can't compare this to anything, so we are stuck in our own conceptions, so maybe this is all moot ;
It doesn't, you p-zombie ;-)!
Seriously, though: my conscious experience of the world (what I'm subjectively aware of) is continuous (in the sense of modeling the world as continuous in time and space dimensions), but it's updated by messages from my sensory cortices at discrete intervals. So it's a continuous model updated at discrete intervals, which sounds screwy and is because it amounts to the brain "retconning" my experience of reality fast enough that I don't catch it in the act, because the best abstraction over my sensory data is that the world is actually continuous at human-scale.
Which probably sounds incredibly confusing and would be a 4-page paper if I had to actually make it convincing. Goddamnit not again.
I don't care for the word simulate because it implies our minds attempt to faithfully model the physical world (which isn't to say we don't in some cases). I think if you're going to make this argument, it might be better to call it the process of inference (using a particular and individual model) about the physical world.