>This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of "expl

>This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of "explaining consciousness", instead spend their entire contents explaining some hypothesis involving meta-consciousness and then proceed to declare victory without ever touching consciousness itself I think this trend is bound up inextricably with our efforts to distinguish ourselves from "lesser" animals. A monkey may be able to reason intelligently, but it cannot communicate to us whether it is aware of itself doing so. We therefore lack evidence of meta-consciousness in animals and tend to attach out-sized significance to it as a potential mark of human superiority. Even though absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. From an evolutionary perspective, consciousness seems to derive from the same mental equipment pre-human hominids developed for handling social interactions. The ability to model and predict the mental states of other hominids provided a survival advantage. Once sufficiently developed, this ability can be applied to itself, so that the hominid is modeling its own thought processes and mental states. To me, this doesn't seem like some sort of deeper, insoluble mystery, but rather the symptom of an unsatisfactorily detailed model of that mental equipment. I think the problem loses its peculiar appeal when we can identify with a reasonable degree of certainty that what we experience as consciousness corresponds to specific neural pathways and configurations. Right now, the philosophical arguments are too abstract to be convincing and the science is too immature to discourage all the useless theorizing.