I wonder if a reflex to identify the where and the how of consciousness might not necessarily, if inadvertently, render the what inaccessibly unintelligible. Distributed (as emergent) system properties inhabit their transmission media in a counter-intuitive way.
Yes – where, how and what are all different perspectives on the same abstract conceptual entity but the kind of logic consciousness inflates is as much a question of what is absent as of what is present. This logical twist occurs in a diverse spectrum of complex systems and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to (eventually) discover that consciousness is itself our experience of this, an underlying dynamical bias in complex systems towards recursive system self-propagation.
I have been investigating this kind of conceptual model in a context of technologically-mediated communication, language and meaning. The machinery of explanation has a tendency to become our conceptual prison and, enigmatically, even more so when we intend to free our minds from it.
