"knowing" and "experiencing" may or may not be different things. I believe they are aspects of the same thing. But equating them does not solve the problem. Wh

"knowing" and "experiencing" may or may not be different things. I believe they are aspects of the same thing. But equating them does not solve the problem. What does it mean "to know" as opposed to contain, or have access to information? A computer program, in one sense, "knows" what the current value of a variable is. But it has no awareness of its own knowing. There is no doubt that we are creatures of stimuli that is computationally processed in the nervous system. However, there is an ontological difference between the the ability to process stimuli, and the experience of said stimuli. The presumption is that with a sufficiently complex system, the ability to experience stimuli will self-reflective awareness, i.e., consciousness will emerge. But that's a whole lot of hand-waving. What is the mechanism? None is offered. It is only assumed. As others have noted, we cannot even agree on what the term "consciousness" means, and because of this, some would like to posit that consciousness does not actually exist, i.e., that it is illusory. The irony of this conjecture is that they are trying to convince self-aware beings that they are not self-aware. The intent to convince the other is itself a function of self-awareness. Intent cannot exist without self-awareness, and Persuasion of "the other" also cannot exist without self-awareness. Denying a phenomenon does not make it go away. I could just as easily respond to the person making this argument that if, indeed, self-awareness is an illusion, then so is their argument. It is mere data, the product of a series of calculations leading to a linguistic expression that intends to communicate nothing. It is merely the output from an extremely complex set of interlocking algorithms. Despite the difficulty of agreeing to a definition of consciousness, we each, to a person, know what it is because of our own experience. The reason all current attempts to explain consciousness are unsatisfactory is because these attempts contradict our common experience. In fact, every attempt so far denies experience itself. They are unsatisfactory because they are illogical, or because they do not provide any explanation at all, but merely presume that somehow the conclusion is achieved, despite the lack of any mechanism in the proposition that can bring us to that conclusion. If we can even go so far as to agree: "Consciousness is a property of a being that is aware of its own existence, and is able to contemplate its own existence as an entity distinct from its environment," this does not make it any easier to explain how any computational model will arrive at such a property. One does not have to be a theist to acknowledge this. Some of the best minds in consciousness research are atheists.