Replace "illusion" with "perception" and it will make a lot more sense.
Consciousness does obviously exist in one form or another, but when people think intuitively about consciousness they imagine it as an actor. A little guy in your head that looks at the world and makes decisions.
That's the illusion. That "little guy", that "self", isn't the one doing the work, your brain is the one doing the work. The little guy is a how the brain tries to make sens of itself.
Just like photons hitting your eyeballs might be interpreted as cats and dogs out there in the world, the brain interprets or perceives whatever it is doing internally as a "self".
> You can't prove consciousness from behavior (afaik)
Without some sens of self any creature would have a pretty difficult time surviving, as it wouldn't be able to tell itself apart from the rest of the world.
> The little guy is a how the brain tries to make sens of itself.
That still doesn't explain consciousness itself. Though I think there are many different interpretations and definitions for the word consciousness so we might be talking about a different one.
> Without some sens of self any creature would have a pretty difficult time surviving, as it wouldn't be able to tell itself apart from the rest of the world.
A cell just replicates because that's what the molecules in it happen to do
> That still doesn't explain consciousness itself.
Well, which part doesn't it explain? It's pretty conclusive as far as I am concerned. As among other things, you can explain why philosophers would even ask that question in the first place.
> A cell just replicates because that's what the molecules in it happen to do
And transistors just go on and off, yet people still spend years studying computer science. The existence of simple mechanism at one level doesn't prevent higher order mechanism at another, quite the opposite. Those cells aren't going to do much replicating when you get killed by a tiger, some awareness of yourself and the environment helps prevent that.
It doesn't explain how consciousness emerges from this. Brains/computers/processes can self-reference or self-explain all they want, that still doesn't say how doing so results in having the actual consciousness you experience.
It's not a trivial thing we're talking about here: there could be a brain just executing logic and making decisions, or there could be that same brain but it's actually aware of that fact, not just aware in the sense that it's processing inputs including the inputs from which it can derive that it itself exists, but aware like you are there and the one in that brain.
The only one that you can know for sure has consciousness is yourself, but can you explain why you have it?
If the brain is an electromechanical process that works on its own, and consciousness is just observing it, then it doesn't need this observer, the process already does the same on its own.
> there could be a brain just executing logic and making decisions, or there could be that same brain but it's actually aware of that fact
But here is the thing: You are not aware of any of this! You are only aware of the world around you and yourself in the form of a high level description. You are aware of cats, dogs, your arms and legs, etc. But that's perception, not processes being magically self aware. You have no clue what your brain is actually doing, that's completely invisible to you.
And that's the illusion. The process you are trying to explain doesn't exist. Consciousness is not processes being self aware. Consciousness is a process that tries to model the world in a way your brain can use to make sense of the world. And just like it does it with cats and dogs, so does it with itself. The thing you call "yourself" is a perception generated by the brain, it's not a thing that exist and does stuff.
If you have a model that says the brain is a singular entity there will always be problems how to phrase meta-activity such as self-awareness and consciousness. If the brain is singular, what does the observing? Does the observing part belong to the brain or not? If the brain is observing itself, which part does the observing and which is the observed? Can we change the roles, and make the observee the observer? How does "the brain" decide what "the brain" is thinking about?
The problem with this model is that it's regarding the brain as a whole as if it's a single processing entity, since that's how we experience it, but physically that's far from the truth: the brain is a highly segmented parallel processing machine and (for as far as I know) there is no clear control hierarchy within the brain to point at a single location to say "this is where [thought/sensation/self] originates".
So my theory is that consciousness is the emergent property of many separate specialized brain areas responding to and interacting with each other: either directly (neuronal links), via the body (flexing a muscle tightens the skin, creating a sensory feedback loop), and through the world (turning your head changes what your eyes perceive).
So speaking in terms of functionality, there is no "brain" as a single entity. The brain is like an ant colony, using hormones and electrical impulses to keep its disparate parts acting in unity. Under this model, consciousness can be defined as the push and pull between these parts, and self-awareness as the consensus model under which the separate parts reached some equilibrium. You won't have problems defining which parts do the observing and which parts are observed: what we "experience" as our mind is the tug-of-war between the processing areas, not the processor activities themselves. And similarly, what we experience as consciousness is the ability of our "mind" to drown out that cacophony and purposefully cede control ("focus") to different brain areas at different times.
Of course, there's no evidence that any of this is true, and there's still plenty of questions about the mechanism through which this would happen, but for me personally this model has allowed me to move on from the vicious cycle of having to first define "brain" in order to define "thought" in order to define "awareness" in order to define "mind" in order to define "self" in order to define "brain".
Replace "illusion" with "perception" and it will make a lot more sense.
Consciousness does obviously exist in one form or another, but when people think intuitively about consciousness they imagine it as an actor. A little guy in your head that looks at the world and makes decisions.
That's the illusion. That "little guy", that "self", isn't the one doing the work, your brain is the one doing the work. The little guy is a how the brain tries to make sens of itself.
Just like photons hitting your eyeballs might be interpreted as cats and dogs out there in the world, the brain interprets or perceives whatever it is doing internally as a "self".
> You can't prove consciousness from behavior (afaik)
Without some sens of self any creature would have a pretty difficult time surviving, as it wouldn't be able to tell itself apart from the rest of the world.