I understand the downvotes for retina_sam's comment for the number of unproven ideas it asserts, but as unlikely as it seems in our materialistic view of the universe, I think it's important to not lose sight of the possibility that maybe there really is something special, something non-physical, about awareness. It is really poorly understood, and I still have not seen an adequate explanation for why I can perceive things and be aware of them.
"Awareness is an illusion", as proposed by some thinkers, certainly doesn't do it for me, because there's still something that has to perceive that illusion. It's got to be an emergent property of sufficiently complex logical processing, but how does it emerge? What is it really? I feel like I'm still missing a vital step.
The lack of an adequate explanation does not demand the need for a non-physical explanation.
I think that because consciousness is part of the core understanding of ourselves, we're drawn to a non-physical and spiritual explanation.
But as a phenomenon the conscious mind is not different than other observed phenomenons.
The rational approach would therefore be to expect an explanation that can be provided by our physical environment just as we do with any other unexplained phenomenon we observe.
I have never understood the argument that "observation" is something special and that it must be taken into consideration. In fact, is it really the brain that is observing a phenomenon or is it something else?
In the double slit experiment, it really isn't the brain, is it? It's the screen you place some distance away from the slits, or the electron detector if you place it in one slit only. The fact that "an outside observer" only sees the pattern made by these detectors later and may reason about them is entirely unnecessary to the experiment itself and to the collapse of the wave function. If you leave the results of a double slit experiment lying overnight, has the wave function not collapsed for longer? As such, the "observer" in these experiments are devices, just like in most other experiments.
Just as the infamous cat is an observer of a quantum system, for whom the wave function has collapsed potentially much earlier than for an outside observer. A wave function collapse is in that case much more of a statement of information state than about the state of reality, which is the exact point of quantum mechanics, in that there must be a distinction now between "observers" (which my be single atoms, mind!) inside of the sphere of influence of an event (whether that event may be bounded by physical barriers or a light cone is irrelevant by the way). [Note that Schrödinger brought up the cat example exactly to point out that the world does not exist in a blurry double-state way even if unobserved.]
The same is true for most psychological observations, which get recorded by a computer, by a pen or by an undergrad. The fact that someone else observes these observations doesn't change the phenomenon in any reasonable way.
One more analogy: we now have computers that are entirely capable of recording/observing phenomena by themselves, some of them internal to themselves even, where we have no other way of recording such phenomenon. If you run an A/B test on a web site, let it run for long enough, then look at your analytics page and it says to accept one hypothesis with 99.99% probability, then you have exactly the same situation as if you had done the experiment through other people and publishing it as a paper. Except, of course, no human mind has "observed" the phenomenon, neither directly nor indirectly, until you opened the results page. So what it comes down to is this: did the result exist before you read the results page? I would answer yes.
All of this is a long way of saying that IMHO the observation of a phenomenon does not change the phenomenon itself.
> "Awareness is an illusion", as proposed by some thinkers, certainly doesn't do it for me, because there's still something that has to perceive that illusion.
Maybe the illusion is just perceiving a past/previous instance of itself -- which further sustains the illusion? The recursion obviously bottoms out at the point of emergence, if we assume that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon.
(Don't take this too seriously -- I just think it's fun to think about these things.)
Roger Penrose wrote an interesting (if unavoidably controversial) book about these questions, "The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and the Laws of Physics".
"Awareness is an illusion", as proposed by some thinkers, certainly doesn't do it for me, because there's still something that has to perceive that illusion. It's got to be an emergent property of sufficiently complex logical processing, but how does it emerge? What is it really? I feel like I'm still missing a vital step.