>>9580883>Also what is phenomenal consciousness vs. just consciousness?I'll copy-paste something I've written in other threads:
Most commonly, consciousness simply refers to the function of the brain: How we react to environmental stimuli, control our behavior, categorize information, and use language. It seems like biology can in principle easily account for everything that goes on here. This leaves out the other side to consciousness, which is commonly referred to as "phenomenal consciosuness", which is what the hard problem is about. Here we are asking the question of why it feels like anything to be you from the inside, why all the functions of the brain emerging from every molecule interaction doesn't just happen without a phenomenological subject there to experience it. To pose it in a slightly different language: Why there is an "I" present? An "I" does not need to be present, hypothetically, for you to exhibit the exact same behavior.
Phenomenal consciousness is the only thing in the world where outlining the behavior doesn't seem to get you anywhere. For every other thing, no matter how complicated, it can in principle be reduced to the complex behavior of elementary particles (or quantum interactions); axioms like "things exist in the universe and behave a certain way" usually buys you a lot of explanatory power over any phenomena, but when it comes to phenomenal consciousness, this approach runs into a wall. No matter how something behaves, it seems it shouldn't be able to amount to anything but more behavior, yet we also get phenomenal experience. This highlights a big gap between explaining how something functions, and explaining phenomenal experience. From this gap between function and experience, we can infer that we're dealing with something radically different here; something where the behavior doesn't even begin to account for the core phenomena.
