Hi Paul,

It sounds like you have a deeper knowledge than I do. The most technical I got was with the Hawkins book. I, of course, know what it feels like to have a highly reflective brain, and that certainly informs me. I don’t know the bio-chemistry or electro-physics involved, just as Darwin didn’t know about DNA. What I have is just the basic concept that seems to explain what we’re experiencing. The more I’ve thought about it, the more sense it has made. That scientists haven’t yet pinned it down doesn’t mean much to me. Until I hear a better guess at what’s going on up there, I’m still liking the one I’ve landed on.

If it arrises from bioelectric fields creating a hologram of consciousness, that would be interesting. But the end result would be the same. Our brain has become aware of its own processes.

If it turns out that there is a duality, or a shared singular consciousness, I’m totally down with that too. How cool would that be? And that would have much bigger ramifications.

You’re point about not experiencing the outside world lands well. It’s what I was trying to say about the neural patterns being the only way we know the world.

One more thought on qualia, which seems to stump so many people. I’d say simply that the reason it feels like something to experience the world is because that’s how life works. I suspect that all life forms respond to sensation, not by some dispassionate, mechanical robot-like directives. Be it an amoeba moving toward food, a fresh hatched sea turtle crawling toward the water, or us. Certainly in mammals, sensations rule the roost. Qualia is simply us feeling that. When you add awareness, the experiences intensifies. There has to be qualia. We couldn’t function without it.

Why is this the way life works? Again, I have no idea. The biochemistry and physics or it are beyond me, and don’t change the basic idea or my understanding of being alive, or “qualia.”

The sweets sound delicious.

Thanks.