To understand consciousness, why can't we just look at the difference between brain activity during all the conscious processes (e.g. listening to someone speak) and all the unconscious ones (e.g. breathing)?
Obviously neuroscientists will have thought of this, so my question is why didn't it work?
Or an even better example, when we are actually breathing consciously/manually compared to normal unconscious breathing.
How does that not reveal what cosciousness is and how it works?
define "consciousness"
that's what we want to find out...
That's already done by the majority of the cortex, user. A decorticate person can still be "alive", whereas destruction of the brainstem kills them by cessating vital functions. But that doesn't mean the cortex is the "seat" of "consciousness" in the Cartesian way you're implying. Perception (please say this instead of consciousness, consciousness is a loaded word) requires thalamic relay to the cortex before it is properly "perceived", and severe perceptual abnormalities can be induced by this means. Direct stimulation of thalamic bodies with electricity, or interruption of the complex and delicate circuits of the brainstem that arise to relay sensory transduction (your eyes, ears, etc.) into the thalamus, as in the case of stroke and atypical hallucinogens like ibogaine, which irritate the peduncle and the cerebellum.
That's great and all, but the problem is nobody really "gets" how the thalamus turns, or helps turn, glutaminergic transduction into perceptions, or even the best way to measure this, because the known method to manage the thalamus (sticking an electrode in it) is very invasive, imprecise, and potentially very disruptive to the health of the organism.
Basically, if you figure out the monster complexity of thalamic-subcortical inhibition-excitation burst-tonic circuits, regardless of cortical processes, perception and "qualae" would be very easy to understand. But nobody does yet, and nobody quite understands how to go about it.
Does awareness of our memories and imagination also count as perception according to this?
Yes. You can't have memories of things you haven't yet perceived from a sense organ. Of course the actual process of encoding memories from sensory processes is relatively well-understood, with modern examinations of CAMKII and GABAnergic amnesia agents. Everyone has blacked out or roofied themselves, and have some intuitive understanding that excitement makes remembering things easier in a "flashbulb" way. It's everything that comes before that, the transition of a flashbulb sensation into a perception that's very complex and irritating.
>You can't have memories of things you haven't yet perceived from a sense organ.
Including semantic memory?
A semantic memory isn't more special than other kinds of memory. A fact is something that requires prior sensory knowledge just like an episodic memory of it happening to you. You couldn't remember, lets say, that an outhouse like feces if you had never smelled feces before or associated it with the word, image, feeling of a model outhouse, and so on, with associations concerning at the base, sensory inputs.
One more question. What do you think about this song? How does it make you feel? Do you enjoy it?
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