This is what it's all about!!!
Consciousness is feeling. Not necessarily emotions, although that type of feeling is present in those with higher degrees of consciousness. Like us. But the most basic definition of consciousness comes from Nagle, in What is it like to be a bat? :
"Something that it is like" means what it feels like. Subjective experience is the feeling of being.But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism. There may be further implications about the form of the experience; there may even (though I doubt it) be implications about the behavior of the organism. But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something it is like for the organism.
I believe consciousness is causal. But how can such a thing be? Let's consider Greene's words again:
In the same vein, I propose this:Mass produces and responds to a gravitational force, and electric charge produces and responds to an electromagnetic force. So while I can’t tell you what these features of particles are, I can tell you what these features do. In the same vein, perhaps researchers will be unable to delineate what proto-consciousness is and yet be successful in developing a theory of what it does—how it produces and responds to consciousness.
Proto-consciousness produces and responds to consciousness.
The property of matter that produces consciousness makes matter subject to consciousness.
Still, how would it work? Again, it is feeling.
Think about how you move your muscles when you write with a pencil. Think about it as clearly, in as much precise detail as you can. Exactly what do you think? Exactly which muscles do you move? Exactly how do you accomplish the movement of each muscle?
Let's think about how infants move. At first, they move uncontrollably. Their limbs jerk all around. But soon, they learn control. How does this happen? It happens by feeling. They feel what it's like when their arm moves this way, when their leg moves that way. I don't mean an emotion. I mean the feeling of physical motion. And they remember when a movement lead to something good. Their arm stretched out that way, and they made physical contact with mom. The next time they wanted to touch mom, they reproduced the feeling of the arm moving the way it did last time. And they get their reward of more physical contact with mom.
When I want to write something with a pencil, I don't think of the specific muscle fibers in all my fingers and arm, telling each to move in exactly the right way. I know what I want to do. I can vocalize my intentions. But those specific thoughts aren't how I move.
I move by reproducing the feelings of the movements. This is what it feels like to move my fingers in this manner. Feeling is what consciousness is, and feeling is how consciousness is causal.
Babies certainly aren't thinking in terms of moving muscles. When they're young enough, they aren't thinking words at all. I don't know at what point we would say they're thinking at all. But they're conscious. They're feeling. They're feeling emotions, and they're feeling their bodies move. And that's how they move. Driven by the emotions they're feeling, they recreate the feelings of the movements in order to touch their mother again.
It's feeling, at the beginning and at the end. "What is it like to be you?" means "How does it feel to be you?" "Write with pencil and paper" means "Reproduce the feelings of writing with pencil and paper."
If we were to compare consciousness to the fundamental forces, it would be, by far, the weakest. Much weaker than gravity. It can only move things like individual atoms. The feelings of movement are the feelings of action potentials. That's what we're recreating. To wax lyrical, it's the humming of our bodies, and, sometimes, we make it hum the tunes we want.
OK, I'm done for now.
Fantasy? Poetry? Nonsense? Maybe all of them. But that's what I think is going on.