I strongly encourage people to read the book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. He makes some rather solid and

I strongly encourage people to read the book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. He makes some rather solid and defensible statements about consciousness (included falsifiable predictions that were later validated with brain imaging), and then makes some rather fantastical inferences. It's thought-provoking. One of the very first things he does in that book is provide a definition of consciousness that he uses throughout the book. It's a more concrete definition than I've seen in most other places, and in part because it's very small. Like most others, I tend to roll my eyes a bit when philosophers start talking about how consciousness is the act of feeling and experiencing, and is the core of being, and is the sum totality of human experience, and start getting all mystic about it. Jaynes takes the opposite approach: it's not all and everything of human experience, it's exactly one specific thing about human experience. Specifically, introspection. The ability to not just observe the real world, but to create a simulated world in our minds and observe that. Replay memories, or test hypothetical present or future situations. Anything else unique about the human mind is taken to be a consequence of consciousness, rather than a part of it. Another big thing he does is show that activities that we normally think of as conscious and rational/intelligent are actually not taking place in the consciousness (these are backed by experimental evidence). For example, chess players get a lot of their performance from perception that filters information before it hits the consciousness. For another, decision-making is shown to be a pre-conscious activity, and a person's supposed line of reasoning is actually a post-hoc rationalization of the decision that the sub-conscious mind dumped into the consciousness (I forget the details of how this is demonstrated). The latter result is... disturbing, because it challenges your notion of free will. But the more I observe myself and others, I can't help but think it's true. One major upshot of this: I think there's sort of an implicit assumption that consciousness is some sort of "higher form" of intelligence. Jayne's work casts doubt on that. It seems that consciousness interacts with intelligence, but most of our "intelligence" does not come from (what he considers) the faculty of consciousness. Observationally, this seems to agree with the state of AI research, and the distinction between weak AI and strong AI. In fact, if one accepts his theories, then weak AI is actually just unqualified Artificial Intelligence, and what we currently call strong AI is not AI at all, but Artificial Consciousness, which should rightly be a separate field.