I hope you realize that neither you, nor I, nor anyone else in the near future is going to solve this problem.
What I have to offer are images and analogies. One of my favorite ways of thinking about consciousness is to consider dreams. Are we conscious during dreams? Silly question????
I don't know about you, but in the moments of awakening after a vivid dream, I have the impression I have been conscious. Often I have the impression that I have seen things that I could not possibly have ever seen in real life. Sometimes I have been flying, Peter Pan style. Other times I have been in houses that are similar to my childhood house, but impossibly large, and having rooms that don't exist.
Dreaming is an activity of the brain. All mammals dream. You can watch people and animals dream. You can record their brain waves and tell whether the focus of the dream is vision or movement.
Dreaming, if you assume the world is objectively real, is pure mental experience, unattached to the real world. But it is not unattached to the brain. The brain is doing what it usually does, but with sensory inputs shut down. It is, in a sense conscious and self-aware.
Now I am going to assert that people, more so than other animals, have the ability to dream while awake. We call it imagination. We can have multiple experiences simultaneously. We can respond to decision making situations by imagining multiple outcomes.
The ability to have multiple selves appears to be a defining trait of humans. I personally think some animals have this ability, but limited to the next second or two in time. We have language and culture, which expands the reach of our imagination.
But note that people differ greatly in their abilities, and under stress, our ability to imagine alternatives narrows.
Human freedom is an act of imagination. Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage -- because, at least some of us, can imagine and dream while awake.
I do not see any particular problem with having multiple instances of awareness or consciousness. It's a mystery, but it doesn't require the assumption that our brains have some magic that is totally missing from animal brains.
I think we have been mislead by a couple of bad analogies. For centuries, humans were distinguished from animals by their ability to reason. I happen to think reason is overrated. It is the easiest of all human activities to simulate with computers. In fact we are already obsolete in the arena of reason.
The computer as it is currently constructed, is a lousy analogy for the brain. Brains are not sequential in any sense that is analogous to what happens in a computer program. Brains do not have CPUs that are separate from memory. Brains correlate sensory inputs and responses "instantly". Well not instantly, but not in a linear, logical mode either. Anyone who argues has had the experience of saying something before knowing what he or she is going to say. Athletes do things without thinking. Brains are built first of all, to do. And do it quickly.
When we are thinking, we are doing in our imagination. Multiple instances of our dream selves are living out scenerios of past and future possibilities. It's quite a trick, but it is not qualitatively different from what animals do.
Freeper tortoise has assurred us that AI researches have a handle on what needs to be done to simulate this in silicon, but adds the stipulation that we can't build the hardware yet. I bet.
One of the problems with associating thinking, willfulness and memory with the brain is that we also see it in biological systems where there is no brain.
The amoeba, for instance, which has been exposed to Chinese ink, will remember the experience and refuse to go for it the next time.
The will to live exists in all living organisms, from bacteria to whales. And even if one uses the Shannon definition (successful communications) to delineate between what is life v non-life/death - viruses have the will to live.
This is prima facie evidence that the will does not exist in the physical brain.
betty boop suggests that consciousness is field-like for an individual. I believe we are on the same "wave length" in that regard.
I perceive the "will to live" being universal (perhaps a field) or perhaps global to this biosphere, i.e. Fecundity principle, the evolution of one. Thus the phenomenon of collective consciousness among bees, ants, etc. - and the trend to autonomy, semiosis and self-organizing complexity. In Scriptures this might be the nephesh spoken of in Genesis 1, the soul of living creatures and perhaps the will of the "creature" (the whole) as described in Romans 8.
But man has a much greater willfulness than this - a sense of good and evil, right and wrong, altruism and selfishness, etc. He is much more likely to rebel against the natural order of things. All physical laws are obeyed in non-life and in life but man seeks to overcome their constraints by his inventions whether airplanes or refrigerators or by experiments in the physics lab. He rebels against nature as well, growing plants out-of-season, inventing new breeds and cloning sheep. He wages war and peace. In Scriptures this would be called the ruach.
Men (or at least some men) also have a sense of reality which transcends the measurable, i.e. space/time. It is as if he knows he belongs to something much greater, or that he doesn't belong "here". He seeks Truth. He seeks God. In Scriptures this would be called the neshama or ‘breath of God’.
In “My Credo” Einstein framed it this way:
Dear js1138, you stipulate as if the matter you describe had been already validated. So please allow me to counter-stipulate on the same terms.
Consciousness is not unattached from the brain. Unless the brain is dead, of course. The brain is like a kind of geiger counter, recording the activity of neuronal firings, etc., etc. That is to say the brain is not the cause of the neuronal firings, etc., etc. It facilitates them, and can produce a read-out if properly hooked up to an EEG. Then we, the observer can look at the read-out, recognize patterns of activity, etc., etc. But we cannot say that the brain knows anything about that, or is "aware" of these activities.
Consciousness also includes unconscious states; dreaming is likely a good example of such. Consciousness also includes self-consciousness, which (apparently) is an attribute of humans only (as far as we know). But all living organisms -- definitely including Alamo-Girl's amoeba, which in the experiment was observed to "learn" the difference between india ink and a food source, so as not to mistake the former for the latter, and so "wouldn't be fooled again" -- possess some type of sentience, awareness -- and these are things that also belong to consciousness. So I agree with Alamo-Girl: even living organisms that do not have organized brains still have access to some form of consciousness.
And so I think that consciousness in all its forms (including dreaming) definitely belongs to the real world; for it is the distinctive, perhaps determinative, attribute of all living things in some form or fashion.
You said you thought A-G was trying to reduce biology to physics. As I'm somewhat aware of her thoughts in this matter, I'd hazard to say that what she's about is to rescue biology from physics -- in the sense that biology isn't reducible to the physical laws. Or to put it another way, living organisms have a physical basis, plus something else which is not physical. The latter is what makes them living. (Alamo-Girl, please correct the record if I've misrepresented your views here.)
You wrote: "Freeper tortoise has assurred us that AI researches have a handle on what needs to be done to simulate this in silicon, but adds the stipulation that we can't build the hardware yet...."
The operative word in this statement, it seems to me, is simulate. Obviously, before someone may "simulate" something, there must first be a something to simulate. That something, however, remains unaffected, whether the simulation is successful or not: Either way, it continues to be the something it is.