I'll try again:
Once upon a time, there was a soldier whose job was to control a semi autonomous drone over a battlefield. Part of his job was to spot and kill soldiers doing the same job, but for the other side. One day, he was laying in the middle of a confused and complex battlefield, carefully studying the image from the infrared camera in his drone. Suddenly, he spotted the telltale signature of a drone operator (1) and fired a missile at the newly identified and unsuspecting target. Shortly after firing, he realised he was being targeted by a missile. As he desperately tried to scramble out of the way, he noticed that his target was also trying to escape. Suddenly it dawned on him: (2) he had fired a missile at himself.
The difference between (1) and (2) is the difference between seeing yourself and seeing yourself as yourself. Personally I think that this is half of the story of consciousness and, for tediously extensive reasons, this can trick only be managed by creatures that use language or something so like language that you might as well call it language. A zombie, of the philosophical sort, may well be able to recognise and act on the realisation that the entity that has paint on it and the entity that is behaving like it has paint on it are the same entity, but that's not the same thing. Or to put it another way, I hold that a something about which nothing can be said and a nothing about which nothing can be said are not the same thing.
This recognition is a form of binding that makes an explicit connection between the inner mental states and the outer physical states. Merely having mental states, being, as Nagel put it, something that it is like something to be, is not enough. The problem is that, in making this binding, there's an almost irresistible metaphor literally standing there waiting to be used. while the mind is a pretty uncertain thing, the body is conveniently real with clear boundaries, interests (like not eating or hurting itself, for starters, and rather obviously skin. It has an outside and an inside. As Strawson the elder pointed out in his seminal work 'Persons', without a lot of heavy and unavailable (at the time) science there is no particular reason to to think the mental life is in the head - or indeed singular. A theme Dennett returns to in 'Where am I'.
However, there is a very very fundamental problem: there is no way that a person can make sense of the real time behaviour of another person from the biology. This isn't a problem for cavemen. this is as true today as it was half a million years ago. Even if we had a perfect model of a brain and knew everything about it, that model would be too unwieldy to deploy in real time. We have to bodge up a way of making sense of people that works in real time. It doesn't have to be biologically accurate, or even biologically plausible, it just has to give us a scrabbling handhold on what the hell someone is going to do next. If it can also explain what they just did, that's a bonus.
We have. It's called variously 'folk psychology' Propositional Attitude talk, Intentional systems theory, The Intentional Stance, and so on.
We assume rationality.
We ask what beliefs a person should have - either due to biological agenda or common knowledge or even asking nicely. Let's be clear - a belief isn't a biological kind, it's clearly a linguistic one - the vehicle is a declarative sentence and the content is a proposition. This is conceptual content only.
We find out what desires a person should have in much the same way.
Then we do the magic trick - we simply assume that a person will act rationally upon their beliefs to bring about their desires. If the prediction proves correct we assume they had those beliefs. If not, we tell another story. Beliefs and desires are an instrumentalist (or less) strategy and not remotely realist.
Not only are beliefs, desires and rationality assumed - there's also an assumption that there is a single agent, a selfish self, that has hopes, desires and fears. That has purposes, agendas and perspectives. That has beliefs, knowledge and attitudes. That has a story; a narrative made up of history, beliefs and future.
Remember, at this point this is nothing more than the putative illata of a folk theory of prediction and explanation of behaviour. It's clear that we use this, or some functionally equivalent variation, all the time to predict and explain others - the assumption that every body, that is everybody, has all this is as ubiquitous as it is biologically infeasible, in fact biologically defeasible.
However, with the metaphor of the body suggesting a unitary thing with clear boundaries of skin and skull and folk psychology assuming a unitary thing of beliefs and desires, is it any surprise that we internalise both metaphors. and assume we have a self, a Cartesian captain sitting in the wheelhouse?
While this is lousy for understanding how we work, it's bloody handy for applying folk psychology to ourselves. This allows us to explain behaviour that otherwise, for lack of understanding of the biology, we'd have to shrug and call instinct or intuition or some other largely meaningless word. We do it all the time and in fact, when as a result of agnosias, aphasias and other mental damage, the illusion is broken we carry on explaining away - in ever more baroque confabulation - as the disjunction between explanation and reality widens. As Dennett put it: should we see this as an ability suddenly learned in response to trauma or as a way of life unmasked?
Seeing ourselves on the same model as we see others pays off big time - we can use the predictive strategy as a motivating strategy - work out what would be rational to do and do it - we can use it as a learning strategy allowing us to tell ever more baroque stories and suddenly here we are: homo narrans, the story telling ape. That's one half of the story, then there's the other half
I don't believe there is a hard problem. Or rather I do: the really hard problem is how phrases like, 'I'm sorry, it's terminal', can have the effect they have on our brains. Answers on a postcard please.
However, the answer to the question 'why does it feel like something to be something that it feels like something to be, is simple: that's what it feels like to have the sort of biology we have sharing information in the sort of brain we have in the way that we do. We don't get excited about why water is wet, rust is reddy brown or any number of emergent features of stuff. It just happens that this particular emergent feature of stuff can only be noticed from the perspective of a functioning user illusion in a brain. There's nothing odd or mystical about this, it just happens that water is wet and sharing information causes the illusion that the lights are on - and the illusion is quite enough to be real. Don't forget, a correctly simulated rainshower will only cause virtual wetness, but correctly simulated thought can do what thought does inside and outside of the simulation.
That's not to say we can simulate consciousness. We can't. A system can have consciousness, but every brain is different, stochastic and chaotic - we all get our own unique show. Even if you could precisely simulate that (and you can't) then all you'd have is two versions of the same problem - you wouldn't get any closer to reading a mind/brain. It's only once our very private inner states are parsed, imperfectly, into language that we can communicate.
Descartes led us astray. The Cogito assumes that the mind and the body are different things to prove that they are different things. Last time I looked, this is a formal fallacy. The fact is that his skeptical argument only 'proves' that the mind cannot be doubted while the body can if you already assume that the mind and the body are different things. That's just one more reason dualism sucks. As a monist (and boy am I one of those) the default assumption has to be that the mind is the body in action. (Or. at the very least, supervenes upon the body). When rather a lot of science shows that there are some pretty compelling correlations between body and mind, it's time to get into that virtuous circle of science informing metaphysics as metaphysics informs science.
So that'll do - there are two aspects to consciousnesses. One public and embedded in the conventions of language and one private and embedded in the biology of the brain. The two are a hopeless mare's nest and that makes systematic study a little challenging.
