>>14343621I thought of a better way to explain it. You might be aware of 'phantom limbs', someone has a limb amputated but still 'feels it'. Just suspend for a moment your knowledge of what's actually happening here - that obviously there is something happening in the sensor-motor cortex of the brain that is giving the 'illusion of feeling'.
Now the inverse is also true, a foot may go asleep, or be paralyzed such that while physically attached it provides no sensory data.
Now both of these are segments of a whole, what most people call "consciousness". However let's just zero in on the most simple quality here, that on the one hand we have a piece of flesh that is "not felt" and a imaginary piece of flesh that has the illusion of being felt.
Imagine if we could somehow section off a limb, not a standard amputation, I mean that we could section the illusion of feeling from the whole - such that you had two separate and discrete wholes: the body that it was amputated from, and the newly separate limb. For the sake of argument, let's say this limb is kept alive by an artificial heart and a steady stream of nutrients... but obviously it possesses no brain, no central nervous system. It would now have a sort of 'consciousness' even if it could interpret signals such as 'pain' as would it's former host, it would sense 'something'.
That is the hard problem of consciousness in essence - now, the assumption is that when you amputate a limb, the 'whole' doesn't split, it shrinks to what remains of the host body. But if you were to imagine that some semblance of consciousness remained in this separated limb, why not a pebble, a body of water? That 'something' senses - not an intelligent apprehension of pain, pressure, movement... but of something is the hard question of conciousness.
We know that materially the limb is the same, if it's kept on life support it continues to be able to convey neural impulses, however it is in all probability not conscious
