I reject the premise. Why do we need to accept that there is a difference between "me" and an "automaton"? The whole idea supposes, unnecessarily, that consciousness is real, then demands we explore its nature. It's angels on pinheads!

You are engaging, right now, in philosophical meditation on the nature of consciousness.

You can't reject the premise that we are automatons outright just by saying so. You're standing on the prow of a MASSIVE philosophical ship of people arguing exactly the same... But just next to you is an equally large ship of people arguing the opposite.

Nobody has been able to prove conclusively one way or the other whether or not people are automatons. Nobody has been able to conclude that consciousness is even real. This is just "I think, therefore I am." Maybe it feels good, but it's just another philosophical theory. There's many others.

If you have no interest in participating in them that's fine, but you are participating anyway :p

Yes, I suppose I've gotten sucked into a philosophical argument. :-)

My contention is that consciousness is Sagan's dragon in the garage though: the reason nobody's been able to prove or disprove its existence is that it's not a concept amenable to disproof, as it's possible to infinitely propose some gap between what neuroscience tells us and what we "feel", even though there's no practical necessity that we acknowledge this gap even exists or needs explaining.

There is an infinite universe of things we could believe without contradiction, but we tend not to believe the vast majority of them. Why should we believe in consciousness?

There's also a seemingly infinite gap between what quantum mechanics tells us and how the universe seems to function at our level of perception. Do you also think that there's no practical necessity in trying to explain the gap?

The problem I have is that you are assuming that we've learned all we need to learn about consciousness and that no more questions will yield useful results. Perhaps if we were devoting more time to philosophizing about consciousness than curing diseases, for example, I would agree that we're wasting our time. But I don't have any reason to believe that there's nothing more to consciousness that can be knowable. Besides, we've only been seriously studying the brain for the last century. It would be a remarkable stroke of luck that we'd have figured out consciousness by now.

A satisfactory answer for consciousness could be that there is some fundamental law to the universe that matter, when configured correctly, produces conscious experience at varying degrees. The reason that could be satisfactory is that that path of questions would be fully followed back to the more fundamental questions about existence in general; even if 1000 years go by and we still conclude that the universe is indeed irrational, that means that we'd have answered most or all the rational questions we have about consciousness, among other things. Gravity, for instance, is usually not accounted for in chemistry because, at that level of granularity, its effects are irrelevant. At a larger level, it's a different story. Now I'm not saying that gravity is a direct analogy to consciousness, but of course we could stop at our current understanding of gravity because there's some infinite gap between the how and the why. We don't have anything else to learn there, right?

The problem with arguing against the existence of consciousness is that even if you manage to somehow win the argument then you are by necessity a nihilist. Of course, all nihilistic arguments are self defeating because if nothing matters, why try to argue or believe that nothing matters?

> Why should we believe in consciousness?

Because if it didn't (somehow) exist you couldn't ask that question.

The word "consciousness" is a synonym for "now".

> Why do you need a subjective first person experience [...]?

I reject the premise that I need a subjective first person experience. I don't have a subjective first person experience.[0] I have convoluted, poorly-documented internal data processing mechanisms cobbled together by a blind idiot over millions of years. These could, in priciple, be measured with sufficiently good instruments.[1] They could, in principle, be analyzed and translated into a form compatible with someone else's spaghetti-coded wetware. I don't have a subjective first person experience; I have a objective first person experience.[2]

0: And neither do you.

1: And this is likely to be feasable in the next couple centuries.

2: Like a p-zombie.

> I don't have a subjective first person experience.

Everything you mentioned after this were mechanisms, however inefficient or poorly documented, that support your functioning day-to-day and are practically irrelevant for supporting your argument that you don't have a subjective first person experience. If you explained those mechanisms and "documented" them then all you would be doing is explaining one way your consciousness is fed data whilst still leaving the original question on the table.

At the heart of what constitutes you as an "I" is someone who can experience eating chocolate or taking a warm shower. There is a you that feels what it is like to do these activities.

> There is a you that feels what it is like to do these activities.

Indeed there is; it's a collection of information made out bits, stored on a substrate made out of atoms[0]. There's nothing subjective about it.

"What/why is subjective experience" is a wrong question[1]. Much like "what's before the big bang" (or, more mundanely, "whats north of the north pole") the 'answer' is that (unless we're manifestly wrong about the observable behavior of the universe) the question doesn't even correspond to any feature of reality in the first place.

0: and photons, loose electrons and ions, electomagnetic fields, and miscellaneous other such junk; ask a physicist if you really care.

1: http://lesswrong.com/lw/og/wrong_questions/ is the least awful explanation of this problem that I've found.