Chapter 26 — Consciousness: What STLR Can and Cannot Describe

The previous chapter explained how an accumulated concept of self may form.

This chapter asks a different question:

Can STLR describe some of the functional characteristics associated with consciousness?

STLR does not claim to explain consciousness itself.

It does not explain why subjective experience exists, how the brain produces it, or why pain, love, color, and sound feel the way they do.

Continuous Interaction

While awake, a person continuously interacts with the body and the surrounding environment.

Signals arrive from outside the body:

• light
• sound
• touch
• temperature
• other people
• physical events

Signals also arrive from the body:

• pain
• hunger
• movement
• balance
• tiredness
• internal physical conditions

The person processes some of these Signals, uses existing knowledge, makes decisions, and acts.

Those actions create changes that produce new Signals.

Signals → processing → action → new Signals

STLR may describe parts of this continuous interaction through Signals, active Tags, Hard-Links, knowledge islands, Reference, attention, expectation, and memory.

The Current Focus

A person cannot give equal attention to every available Signal and every stored memory.

Attention creates a current focus.

While driving, the current focus may include the road, nearby cars, traffic lights, and the destination.

While solving a math problem, it may include numbers, symbols, steps, and relevant mathematical islands.

While experiencing pain, attention may be pulled toward the body.

The focus changes from moment to moment.

Signals and thoughts can Reference other Tags and knowledge islands, bringing different content into the current focus.

STLR can describe this changing content.

It does not explain why processing that content is accompanied by a conscious experience.

Consciousness Is Not the Same as Self-Awareness

A person does not have to think continuously: I am me.

Someone looking at a beautiful landscape may become completely absorbed in the sight.

A child watching an airplane may focus on its movement, shape, and sound.

A person solving a difficult problem may focus entirely on the problem.

In these moments, information about the self is not the main object of attention.

The person may still be conscious.

Self-awareness occurs when information about the self becomes the object of attention.

For example, someone may ask: Are you good at mathematics?

You may then Reference memories, abilities, successes, and failures connected with yourself.

Part of the self-concept has entered the current focus.

STLR can describe this change in focus. It does not need to treat continuous self-awareness as a requirement for consciousness.

Feelings and Subjective Experience

STLR can describe some functional relationships involving feelings.

A painful experience may form Tags and Hard-Links involving the body location, the event that caused the pain, fear, avoidance, later memories, and expectations about similar situations.

Love may become connected with a person, memories, expectations, pleasure, safety, and many other Tags.

These relationships may help explain how feelings affect attention, memory, decisions, and future behavior.

But they do not explain the feelings themselves.

Describing the Tags connected with pain does not explain why pain hurts.

Describing the Tags connected with love does not explain why love feels the way it does.

The functional relationships may be described. The subjective experience remains unexplained.

A Functional Description Is Not Consciousness

STLR may help describe functions associated with a conscious human mind:

• receiving internal and external Signals
• directing attention
• activating memories and knowledge
• using context
• forming expectations
• making decisions
• producing actions
• receiving feedback
• maintaining an accumulated self-concept
• directing attention toward the self

These functions are important, but listing them does not prove that they create consciousness.

A system might appear to perform some of these functions. Functional behavior alone may not tell us whether that system has subjective experience.

STLR therefore cannot determine whether another person, an animal, or an artificial system is conscious merely by describing its information processing.

The Boundary of STLR

STLR does not explain:

• why consciousness exists
• how biology produces subjective experience
• why experiences have particular felt qualities
• whether functional processing is sufficient for consciousness
• exactly which living or artificial systems are conscious

STLR makes a narrower proposal.

Signal, Tag, Hard-Link, and Reference may describe some of the functional characteristics commonly associated with a conscious human mind.

This does not mean that those components produce consciousness.

Checking the functional boxes does not solve consciousness.

It shows how far the STLR explanation may go—and where it must stop.