> " Why do not these processes take place "in the dark," without any accompanying states of experience? This is the central mystery of consciousness." > -- Bec

> " Why do not these processes take place "in the dark," without any accompanying states of experience? This is the central mystery of consciousness." > -- Because each information processing system only processes its own information? It only "sees" its input, not some other system's input. That's not the issue. The issue is why experiences are associated with the processing of input. A computer program represents "green" as some combination of bits, but most people don't believe it has an experience of greenness beyond the mechanistic processing of some bit sequence through its predefined rules. Even if our minds are "merely" a set of rules processing information, there's still an extra element we experience that we currently can't satisfactorily explain. > A sophisticated information processing system could be expected to have observations on its internal processes too - just a server might have logs, processed logs and what-not. Good example - do you believe that a computer program that produces and analyzes logs of its internal processes has a conscious experience, analogous to ours? A process that analyzes logs is still a process like any other. There's nothing special about it that would lead us to believe that suddenly experience arises in that process, where it hasn't arisen in all the lower-level processes. This is why one "solution" to the problem of consciousness is to claim that even e.g. thermostats have some degree of consciousness. By claiming all processes are conscious to some degree, you don't have to explain the leap to consciousness. But if you don't accept that solution, then the information processing model only underscores the problem.