There Is No Such Thing as Conscious Thought

"I would rather say that consciousness is not what we generally think it is. It is not direct awareness of our inner world of thoughts and judgments but a highly inferential process that only gives us the impression of immediacy."

Whatever it is you still can't explain it. End of story.

The protagonist considers how consciousness can be simulated. Simulated entities experience subjective time at the same rate, whether their mental faculties are computed in real-time, or if they are only computed once a day (which would result in the "outside world" speeding by them, but their subjective perception of the flow of time never changes).

The protagonist then considers how the same computations could be done on an abacus by hand, over a long enough time period. The question is then, are the mechanisms that compute and result in our own consciousness that different from had someone done it on a computer, or even on an abacus?

I don't think the assertions are all correct, in all cases however.

I do think we spend much of our time on a kind of autopilot, where (the bit of your mind we identify as you) is essentially a passenger. Our actual conscious thought is probably much smaller than we'd like to believe.

I'm looking forward to @bencollier49's thoughts/blogpost.

Can Panpsychism Become an Observational Science?

https://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/579

This comes on the heels of the Free Will debate in neuroscience. Where some observers decipher the lighting up of a cluster of neurons in an fMRI machine milliseconds before an action takes place as proof of external determinism. Or perhaps it is conspiratorial prep for the coming age of state sponsored brain implants and hive mind mass control.

Regardless debates such as these will become moot once in vivo science of mind is achieved, perhaps not until century's end. The more interesting questions in neuroscience tend to be of the form: where do creativity and inspiration come from? We've all had the experience of focused concentration on a puzzling problem. Only to have the solution, fully formed, pop into our heads like a bolt of lighting. Is there some way to fertilize this process? To favor the probability of discovery.

Like, rather than creating a thought the thought is already there, and then we refer to it.

A metaphor : You are in a dark room with a flashlight. You direct your flashlight at a flowerpot. Suddenly you see a flowerpot. But you did not create the flowerpot it just suddenly became visible.

In my model here the process of thinking consists of a series of changes of reference. A series of redirections of attention. You observe a thought. You respond to that thought by directing your attention (much like directing the beam of a flashlight) at another thought. And so on. An endless chain.

Note that I am a longtime meditation enthusiast so my perspective is abnormal and weird.

This does, in a sense, all boil down to semantics. Poeple can argue for hours about whether a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear makes a sound without realizing that they're arguing over the definition of "sound". But the notion of conscious versus unconscious decisions is a useful one, so given that we have multiple possible scientific definitions of "consciousness" that correspond to our traditional conception we might as well pick the one that's most useful.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

This seems like an excellent article. Whether you agree with the author or not, he positions his ideas relative to other thinkers who are positing broadly verifiable ideas about the nature of consciousness, a subject that can easily veer off to irrefutable subjective claims.

"On Having No Head: Cognition throughout Biological Systems"

This is one of the more annoying things editors do to other people's writing.

Haha