I was nodding along most of the time, while reading your explanation. “Consciousness as a software program” have seemed right to me since I first thought about the problem from the materialist perspective. You example with the content of the program existing even if there were no screen and just vocal statements is pretty good. However.
I’m not sure I understand how you make the logical step from “The program actually exists” to “Existence is consciousness”. As it was already mentioned in the thread, the second statement doesn’t depend on all the previous claims, regarding software program and its content.
Why would you even need to make this step? We have a software program, an inner model of ourselves. In this model all kind of stimulus are encoded into inner experiences in some way. What is encoded to be represented in the model we can feel. What is not encoded—we can not. If there were no model there wouldn’t be any inner experience. I was genuinely under impression that the interesting question is how exactly the encoding works. When it is answered the consciousness will be fully explained.
Until then I don’t see how “consciousness is existence” makes us less confused. It just brings back the confusion of panpsychism where we assume that entities without any inner model are somewhat conscious.
I was nodding along most of the time, while reading your explanation. “Consciousness as a software program” have seemed right to me since I first thought about the problem from the materialist perspective. You example with the content of the program existing even if there were no screen and just vocal statements is pretty good. However.
I’m not sure I understand how you make the logical step from “The program actually exists” to “Existence is consciousness”. As it was already mentioned in the thread, the second statement doesn’t depend on all the previous claims, regarding software program and its content.
Why would you even need to make this step? We have a software program, an inner model of ourselves. In this model all kind of stimulus are encoded into inner experiences in some way. What is encoded to be represented in the model we can feel. What is not encoded—we can not. If there were no model there wouldn’t be any inner experience. I was genuinely under impression that the interesting question is how exactly the encoding works. When it is answered the consciousness will be fully explained.
Until then I don’t see how “consciousness is existence” makes us less confused. It just brings back the confusion of panpsychism where we assume that entities without any inner model are somewhat conscious.