Reddit reviews Kinds Of Minds: Toward An Understanding Of Consciousness (Science Masters)

Daniel Dennett discusses this idea in his book, "Kinds of Minds", if anyone is interested.

We assume other humans have subjective experience because they have similar brains, with all the same structures. We know subjective experience in humans is highly dependent on particular brain structures because we know how fragile it can be even in humans.

Two phenomenon in particular make this really clear:

• blindsight - There are two pathways that information from the optic nerve travels into the brain. When one of those two is damaged, all conscious experience of sight is lost. The person experiences reality as if they were blind. However, if the other is left undamaged, the person will continue to respond appropriately (in limited capacity) to visual stimuli. For instance, you can show a person with blindsight an image of an object. Their hand will grab the object on the table, but they will insist they can't see anything.
  
  
• corpus callosotomy . Before contemporary treatments for seizures were available, the corpus callosom would sometimes be mostly severed in patients with life threatening seizures. This would create a split self in the brain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain
  
  So, we know self-hood is highly dependent on specific neurological structures. We know other humans have all those same structures, and we know most animals do not, or have much less developed versions of them.
  
  Because it is so deeply dependent on anatomical structure, I think the burden of proof (that animals actually have any sense of self) falls on anyone wanting to claim they do.
  
  For more reading on the subject, I can strongly recommend the following:
  
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Kinds-Minds-Understanding-Consciousness-Science/dp/0465073514
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Descartes-Error-Emotion-Reason-Human/dp/014303622X
  
  If people want to speculate that animals may experience suffering, they are free to, but when it's such unproven speculation, it's incredibly shitty to feel like they are morally superior people for their dietary choices.

The book was Kinds of Minds by Daniel Dennett. It is not excessively long, and is really good food for thought.

Yes, I agree the computational model is a drastic oversimplification that filters out all types of emergent possibilities.

My own sense, based on reading such as the above and life experience, is that my "observer" or "experiencer", if you will, the observing self that is farthest removed from the physical (or at least hardest so far to identify in the physical brain) and from the brain's cognitive model of experience, is very much at the whim of the physical brain, i.e. dependent on the physical brain functioning as perfectly as possible, to get its information, for the experience it observes. Further, it actually has little recourse to actively intervene in the observed situation without usually some kind of cognitive training (such as meditation), and more typically, some other, lower processes which are more readily measured, are doing the actual decision making. For instance, the "observer" does not operate the voice in your head, rather it observes it. In other words, I am in the middle regarding the debate as to whether awareness of intent isn't just made up after the lower brain reacts automatically to stimuli. I think that happens, but it can be overridden with effort.

Thus rather than saying that the brain doesn't know the difference, it is actually the observer which can have a very hard time telling the difference without all sorts of cognitive tools (mental processes) providing qualifiers to observed phenomena identifying their provenance. The observer is, in other words, easy to fool.

So what is the observer anyway? My guess is that we won't be able to answer that until we are able to manufacture self awareness in order to prove whatever theory we come up with.

Edit: and the brain's cognitive... -> and from the brain's cognitive...

Edit 2: this book