Why does it feel like anything?

Explain every cognitive function and one question survives: why is any of it accompanied by experience? That is the hard problem.

A cut so clean that entire fields could finally disagree productively instead of past each other.

Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness1995

The feeling is second-order perception — a system perceiving its own perceiving. Qualia aren't an extra substance; they're the format in which a self-model renders its own states to itself.

Answers the hard problem's demand on its own terms: the 'what it's like' just is what a self-model's self-access is like from the inside.

We Are All Software2024