Consciousness

The human realization that we are self-aware has
plagued humans ever since they became, well, conscious. Humans realize that we
realize. Why? One answer, more scientific and mechanical than philosophical or
epistemological, is simply because all the elements that make up our brains
talk to each other, thus creating the mind. And the mind is conscious. It's a
neuronal thing according to Francis Crick in his book, Astonishing
Hypothesis. This explains nothing regarding how and why we are conscious.
It only verifies that our brains are made up of various and many tiny things
that in combination allow our brains, and by reference, us, to know stuff.

Another proposed solution is a philosophical one: that
we simply aren't smart enough to ever understand our minds (Christof Koch, The
Feeling of Life Itself). Seems to me that that begs the question unless
one believes that the evidence that we don't understand our minds IS the
evidence that we don't understand our minds.

One that truly baffles me is a book by Donald D.
Hoffman titled The Case Against Reality. Basically we all are in a
computer game that hides (protects?) us from reality--on purpose. Sort of like,
"You couldn't handle the truth." What we perceive to be real, really
isn't. And then, somehow, this all relates to "fitness". This is
justified reasoning because Kant and Plato suggested something similar a very
long time ago. And we all know that if ancients thought it, it must be true.

Michael S.A. Graziano’s book Rethinking
Consciousness is on target to be even more silly than Hoffman's. The idea
in his "attention schema theory" is that when we (pay attention, we
model the world. This supposedly occurred some 350 million years ago.

There are many more more reasonable theories of
consciousness that also don't answer the question, "How do we know that we
know?" It's a hot topic within the scientific community looking for an
atheistical answer that maybe can only be answered by God.

(I would also be interested in researching a bit into
whether other living things might also have a degree of consciousness and what
the possibilities are for consciousness in machines.)