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There is always still the _subjective experience_ of paying attention to whatever I'm paying attention to, of "being the one that sees my visual field", and so on.

There must be fundamental difference between the subjective experience I have of vision and that of a computer with a camera and processing software, I can't imagine that it has a similar experience.

How come there _is_ a subjective "me" that experiences things and can pay attention to them? Given that we are clearly bags full of extremely fancy chemical reactions.




I think there is a difference there, but it's largely because the computer with a camera is such a simple system at this point.

In contrast, you have many, many layers of very sophisticated and interconnected abstraction and reality modeling between that visual stream and other forms of processing. Typically, the higher the level of abstraction, the more "aware" of it you are as it gets filtered and dumped into your attention centers.

In short, even our most sophisticated state of the art "deep" learning algorithms are but puddles compared to the ocean of depth available in your brain. ...and almost none have any form of attentive aggregation and selection.


> There is always still the _subjective experience_ of paying attention to whatever I'm paying attention to, of "being the one that sees my visual field", and so on.

"Being me" is an experience or feeling. We have lots of other feelings both from within and outside our bodies. Could it be that consciousness is simply how it feels to have a focus of thoughts and attention in our brains?




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