Pinkers definition of consciousness

P134 onwards talks about what consciousness is. He says main features of consciousness are sensory awareness, focal attention, emotional colouring and the will.

What I want to understand, is how I work. Consciousness is probably just one aspect. Maybe cows are conscious but they don't exhibit the same behaviour as me.

The behaviour I want explained are things like, how is a human able to
- think about what thought is
- decide where to go for lunch
- express their thoughts in language
- think and judge what they are doing
- have sense of self
- process visual information so they have this virtual reality

What adds complication is that these descriptions include implicit definitions of cognitive abilities. Maybe I can come up with a set of use cases which capture what the mind is. Perhaps what's missing from the use cases above is the idea of sentience. We are not just machines that process stuff 'in the dark'. The idea of sentience, that we see and feel and hear, that more is going on than just the mechanics of information processing... That us wats really interesting

What is the sentience stuff ? The sensation and perceiving ? The qualia? It's not just input. It's as if there is an observer set up, and the observer observes things in the form of sensations. But more than that I don't know. That's the core of our reality tho. These sensations and the virtual world created for us from our eyes.

We might be able to produce intelligent machines that can behave outwardly like us, but we probably wdnt be satisfied with saying they were equivalent to humans until they have that 'light on inside'

It's not enough for them to be programmed to say they feel pain. How do we actually make then feel pain? How do we actually make them think about themselves ? Worry? Want to dance?

We can't observe this stuff bc it's the internal working of the mind.  Similarly we can't see that a program is working by running on the java virtual machine. Maybe sentience is itself some kind o machine, a platform through which the other stuff flows.

Imagine u were trying to find out how a java application worked by observing the electrical activity of a computer. Understanding how the mind works is harder.

p132
What good is consciousness?  That is, what does the raw sensation of redness add to the train of billiard-ball events taking place in our neural computers?  Any effect of perceiving something as red - noticing it against a sea of green, saying out loud "that's red", reminiscing about Santa Claus and fire engines, becoming agitated - could all be accomplished by pure information processing triggered by a sensor for long-wavelength light.  Is consciousness an impotent side effect hovering over the symbols, like the lights flashing on a computer or the thunder that accompanies lightening? And if consciousness is useless - if a creature without it could negotiate the world as well as a creature with it  - why would natural selection have favoured the conscious one?