From what I understand of anesthesia, you can be in a state where you are experiencing (and can even have slow conversation with the doctor) but you don't remember it. If asked, you would say you were unconscious through the procedure, but a video of the interaction would show that you were there with some access to both your memories and the present moment. When dosed properly, the anesthetic blocks the formation of new memories. Somebody very much like you and inhabiting your body was there and experiencing enough to respond verbally.

If you interact closely with people having psychotic breaks and other mental disorders, you can witness someone mistaken about the boundary between themselves and the environment. If you can wrap your mind around that level of malfunction, I think you will begin to appreciate that the very statement "the fact that I am experiencing" is begging the question. The abstract concepts of identity, self, perception, and memory are all intertwined and more nebulous than is comfortable to think about.

My impression here is that intelligent people tend to over complicate this distinction. Consciousness is what separates you from a rock. It’s the fact that you have an inner life at all. That the world shows up for you. The points you make are interesting, but orthogonal to core distinction of what consciousness is. EDIT: as you point out, your examples raise interesting points about personal identity over time, throughout space, etc. These, I argue, are just additional and separate distinctions.

You're still talking about the content of the experience. Remembering it is immaterial. The content is immaterial. That you had an experience of any kind — real, false, remembered, not — is what matters, not what it's an experience of.

I still claim you are begging the question by assuming there is a clear, binary distinction. If you assume dualism and demand an explanation for duality, I cannot satisfy you when my perspective is that dualism is an illusory concept. It is a bit like asking a biologist to explain postmodernism.

Let me borrow a helpful phrase from another reply above: inner life. I recommend some meditation on the possible inner lives of a whole spectrum of creatures. I take the liberty of assuming you would grant humans the richest inner life. What inner life exists in a great ape, dolphin, octopus, monkey, dog, cow, bat, field mouse, tarantula, lobster, honey bee, earthworm, clam, coral, or amoeba? Within any one of those species, how does an inner life vary between a zygote and a fully developed and experienced adult? What about members of those species who have a sensory disability and go their whole lives with a reduced complement of sensory organs or sensory nerves?

Consciousness may be merely an abstraction we place on a typical complex of sensory processing and introspective abilities in our minds. People may have more or less experience with alteration of this complex and form other abstractions such as unconsciousness, trance, daydream, hallucination, blackout, or catatonia.

Outside weird scenarios I mentioned in my previous post, we can only discuss the subset of these experiences which we remember. We don't even know what other qualitative experiences we may be having throughout our lives which are not normally encoded to memory. At risk of returning to my previous topic which you discard as mere "content" of awareness: I would argue that our introspection is just as vulnerable to mistake, confabulation, and delusion as our awareness of the external world. It may be a convenient fiction, much like our visual system papers over the blind spot in our retinas and the motion blur of rapid eye movements.

Apologies for the delay in responding. This week was my hack week, and I had Life stuff happening, too.

> If you assume dualism...

Which I don't. My position on this stuff is in the neighborhood of panpsychism or Objective Idealism, but not quite either, and both of which are very much monist notions.

If you weren't accusing me of holding a dualist position, could you please clarify what you're saying here?

> I recommend some meditation on the possible inner lives of a whole spectrum of creatures.

I've actually spent a fair amount of time contemplating the question of the nature of the inner lives of things not-me, thanks. I can't speak to what that experience might be like. Epistemic asymmetry is a thing. What I don't spend much time contemplating is that they have one.

It's interesting, though, that you bring that up — bats, specifically. Please read Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" if you haven't already. It's one of the first papers I'm aware of to meaningfully articulate this question. Dennett, himself — the thinker whose oeuvre, and particularly "Consciousness Explained", frames this discussion — called it "the most widely cited and influential thought experiment about consciousness."

So, for clarity, my position goes like this: I have an experience of the thing I mean when I say "consciousness" — this "inner life", which, until I'm convinced is somehow a delusion, I will continue to regard as the only direct experience I have. On the principle that solipsism is bullshit, I assume that the other beings like me with whom I share the world also have this 'inner life' thing going on.

Additionally, I see in the world other things which are clearly "beings", but which are, to varying degrees, not like me and the other beings I assume have inner lives. What about them is different, such that they wouldn't have this experience? Is it language? Many have that. Tool use? More than a few. Warm blood? (See: "Do Fish Feel Pain?")

It is, I submit, most parsimonious to assume consciousness of some form on their part, as well. When someone suggests otherwise, they're making a positive assertion, not merely that this imaginary line between "conscious" and "not conscious" goes in that specific place, but that there is a line in the first place, and must justify both.

> I would argue that our introspection is just as vulnerable to mistake, confabulation, and delusion as our awareness of the external world.

Of course it is. I don't think that's even in question. But that's actually my point: when you're introspecting, that's "you", there, in that moment, on that ride. Whether the things you're introspecting about are materially reflective of their antecedents, whether you're thinking clearly or biasedly, whether even your entire narrative in that moment, if not always, is just so much self-serving bullshit, does not matter. You're still introspecting.

That's what I mean when I say the content doesn't matter. Whatever I'm experiencing, true or false, I'm still experiencing.

The question no-one can answer to my satisfaction — all this hand-wringing about its being irrelevant, or illusory, or even incorrect notwithstanding — is how, if the only "things" that matter are reducible to observable, measurable, falsifiable phenomena, it should feel at all.

Because the thing I most want those tools to explain is how I can be here, in existence, having the experience of being here questioning my existence at all.

There is precisely nothing in this kind of reductive ontology that can account for the fact that there is a qualitative nature to my being at all. And yet it is the most direct experience I have. Not what I see, that I see. And, yes, the emotional associations I have with what I see, upon seeing it. Of course that comes from a different part of the brain. Yet I feel that too.

That's the question I want answered — the very thing being hand-waved away.

I suspect I cannot really help you with your question. Also, I only dabbled in introduction to formal philosophy as side-projects to my CS education. Mostly I am self-taught, having spontaneously performed several of the text-book thought experiments on my own, as a child. Apologies if my nomenclature is not quite right for you. I also have a somewhat anti-authoritarian disposition. I tend to adopt or kidnap ideas I encounter without any urge to toe the line of their respective schools of thought.

Yes, I was referencing that being a bat problem. However, what I meant to emphasize was the spectrum of creatures. Most people grant inner lives to familiar animals even though we cannot claim to comprehend them directly. But, many people have incoherent beliefs as they work further down the ladder towards plants, colonies, and other simple life. Their need to find a boundary where the spark occurs is closeted dualism, in my opinion.

I consider a quest for qualia to be essentially dualism in disguise, and endless debates about the term itself to be proxy war on just how to beg the question. When I was lectured by Searle and his views on being a bat and his chinese room, I felt he was begging the question and playing to the peanut gallery. He wants you to assume there is "understanding" that a room lacks. He doesn't want you to dwell on the difference between the room and the system comprised of the room, the rules, the translation state, and the executive functions literally embodied by attendants. I enjoyed a contemporaneous course from Lakoff to consider his metaphorical mappings and category thinking as a counterpoint. We all liked to joke that it might be metaphors all the way down. My reading of these topics may have begun my own gradual turn towards reductionism and behaviorism.

I do not think qualia deserve any special place compared to any other abstraction. I don't think there is anything more real about the sense of first-person experience than there is about a sense of justice or love in a particular human interaction. I think that these are all in the same category of perceptual abstraction. I think ALL abstractions admit or even encourage an ontological failure mode which is to impose discrete symbols over fuzzy realities, and tempt logical deductions over this willful ignorance. This is why I frequently return to topics like identity, memory, and mental pathology which illustrates such failings. I question the "you", the "moment", and the "ride" as all being convenient but potentially misleading abstractions.

Finally, I think that the qualitative experience you seek to explain is tied up in the mind-body problem and has as much to do with introspection of the body and hormonal systems as it does introspection of cognition. I took interest in Rodney Brooks and his subsumption as a possible explanatory mechanism here. To keep insisting that you can discuss the quality of experience independently of the content is, again, a signal of latent dualism to me.