The most interesting view of consciousness that really changed my thoughts on it was from Wegner's "The Illusion of Conscious Will". He basically argues this:
We have an agent-based model to understand the behavior of certain things in the world. When we see a cat chase a mouse we assume that the cat as an agent which has a goal which is to catch the mouse. That is we imagine the intentions of the cat (and the mouse) to better predict what will happen next. This is just a mental model, but it's different than the causal model we use to predict where a baseball will land when you throw it.
We apply this model to all sorts of things because it is useful to help predict behavior. That is we imagine conscious intention as a tool to understand things in our world.
The catch is that when we observer our own mind at work... we apply this same model. This is a weird moment where we try to imagine that we have conscious intentions, but since it is own on selves we are watching this creates the illusion of conscious will.
Whether or not Wegner really nails it, I become increasingly suspicious that consciousness is far less special and much more of a trick than we believe it is. But because that illusion is tied to who we "are" we have a very hard time letting go (of course this idea goes back to Buddha and earlier)
We have an agent-based model to understand the behavior of certain things in the world. When we see a cat chase a mouse we assume that the cat as an agent which has a goal which is to catch the mouse. That is we imagine the intentions of the cat (and the mouse) to better predict what will happen next. This is just a mental model, but it's different than the causal model we use to predict where a baseball will land when you throw it.
We apply this model to all sorts of things because it is useful to help predict behavior. That is we imagine conscious intention as a tool to understand things in our world.
The catch is that when we observer our own mind at work... we apply this same model. This is a weird moment where we try to imagine that we have conscious intentions, but since it is own on selves we are watching this creates the illusion of conscious will.
Whether or not Wegner really nails it, I become increasingly suspicious that consciousness is far less special and much more of a trick than we believe it is. But because that illusion is tied to who we "are" we have a very hard time letting go (of course this idea goes back to Buddha and earlier)