My favorite definition and perspective on consciousness is "the hum of the machinery". I stole it out of Daniel Levitin's "This Is Your Brain On Music", but he didn't really explain it in there, so the rest of this is mostly mine. I.e., don't blame him for my ideas.
To start off this essay-in-response, let's look at personal assumptions.
I prefer a mundane worldview. I try not to add anything to my Official conception of reality unless I can see it in evidence. I have no problem with whimsy, as long as it's understood as such, nor fictional metaphors, as long as it's understood as such. So I don't use ideas like God or Self or Source: I see people, blood and bones and brains, and I don't see anything more. I consider a term like "the mind" to be an abstraction, as much as "harmony" is for music (harmony is not a Thing; it's an artifact of a set of related vibrations being processed in your brain).
So, objective view of reality? Check. So, we start with music, and with harmony.
Harmony. Melody. Balance. Justice. Ma'at. Peace. Equality. Flattening. Stagnancy. Heat Death of the Universe. Oops, wrong direction.
Harmony. Melody. Synergy. Complexity. Richness. Layering. Deep Hierarchies. Boundaries. Limits. Divisions. Opportunities. Symbiosis. Harmony. Mel-- wait, been here already.
(Disclaimer: Keep in mind I'm not an expert by any means regarding any of the mechanics I'm about to describe.)
How does a musical instrument work? Any. Instruments are specific and carefully crafted ways to produce vibrations in a fluid (usually air), which is what sound is. The simplest of instruments is a single string or sheet, stretched to tautness, and plucked or struck. Slightly more complex are the ones that depend on modulating air flow: the vibrations come from the inevitable, but tiny, turbulence in the air being forced into different, yet predictable patterns.
Of course, most instruments are more interesting. The instrumentalis humanis has several vocal chords, a tongue, a gateway controlled by teeth, and a pair of lips. A guitar has several strings and a resonator, plus thorough control over the tautness of each string and exactly how it vibrates in response to strumming. But you get harmony before this.
Harmony starts with individual strings creating a myriad of vibrations that happen to work together as harmonics. Then you get several strings and those sets of vibrations
both work together. Then you get lots and lots of different sets of vibrations and you have an orchestra. That's harmony. Let's move on to the brain.
The brain works on the same principle. And I mean the
exact same principle. Just as an orchestra can be divided into first and second woodwinds, the percussion section, the brass, so can the brain be divided most simply into regions like somatosensory, visual cortex, and so on. And just as each orchestral section is made up of individual performers playing individual instruments, these regions can be subdivided so further. And as the orchestra is led by the conductor, and each section is led by a principal, so are these subregions grouped into a hierarchy of functions, inside layers and columns.
Sensory input is electrical. That's pretty common knowledge; sensory input, converted into electricity (ethernet works the same way), flows up and down the layers and columns discarding information and fitting the remnant to established patterns. Every column is inhibited by surrounding cells, and the subregion ends up acknowledging only a subset of the processed information from its columns. That information gets relayed up to the entire regional area in the same way. Your sensory regions fire off against other regions that drive your motor functions and so on, including all that stuff in your vaunted frontal lobe.
That's how awareness works. It comes in the same way music happens from an orchestra, with only one real difference. The orchestra is synonymous only with the sensory regions; the other regions are like sound engineers who can remix the instruments into completely new stuff for their own purposes. The idea of a conductor should be replaced with the older idea of a concertmaster: just yet another one of the musicians who just happens to be considered leader, in the same way humans emphasize and defer to sight over every other sense.
And beyond that, I find it plausible that these metaphorical sound engineers
continue to play with the information they got from the senses, reconfiguring and repatterning them into new shapes and forms. Someone with frequent brain activity is likely continuing to play with old ideas to discover news ones.
I don't see any reason, here, to assume that consciousness is thus the sole domain of humans. Nor is there any particular reason to assume that the method by which human beings and other brain-enabled animals is the only method by which consciousness can be achieved: that's just the way we're familiar with, and we're familiar with how the brain does its cloud lightning thing.
A rock doesn't have a brain. Most of them aren't very good about conducting electricity, or reshaping themselves as a response to electricity, the way neurons and brain cells do. But that doesn't mean it's not conscious: it just means that, assuming it is, we have no idea how. And if it is, then it probably has no idea how we're conscious, either.
I don't think there is any reason for computers to be unable to achieve self-awareness or consciousness. In modeling it after ourselves, we've already granted it most of the important stuff: fuel, a processor, storage, stimuli, and a way for all of that to interact. All it really needs is a way to describe itself to itself, and a way to manipulate that fast enough to impress us. Output would be a nice addition, if we're going to interact. I find it egotistical and defensive to dislike the notion that computers can't be conscious simply because they're not human and not made out of carbon.
I also don't find explainability to be any stop to wonder. I'm just as pretentious and full of myself knowing all of this; if I want to throw a spiritual spin on the thing, I will, but I find it pretty cool. I mean, just look at XKCD 505 or 676. That's cool. If someone figures out exactly how to electrically manipulate my brain to think a certain way, I would be fascinated. I'd punch him in the face if he tried it on me, but it's still awesome: think of all the forensics we could do in figuring out why some people are hostile or defensive or angry. We could stop making idle speculations about childhood trauma or emotionally charged past events and actually figure it out with a degree of actual certainty. But that's way, way in the future. Probably a good century of solid science, at least.
Hrm. I think that pretty much covers as much as I can. The music stuff was from memory, some Levitin's book, some physics class, some Wikipedia. The brain stuff is a hacked-up summary of Jeff Hawkins' "On Intelligence" book. (I.e., from memory plus skimming the book really fast to refresh and ignoring any remote attempt at detail.) Jeff Hawkins being
this guy. He signed my copy of his book.
*fanbois*
Okay, I'm done.
Whoo! Under the character count limit!
Oh wait! If I have space,
YouTube - Twin Musical Tesla Coils playing Mario Bros 