alt Hacker News> Do you imagine the self being split into an "actor" who makes all the decisions, and an "observer" who can see what's going on but can't influence the actor?
Not exaclty, because I bieleve this distinction between the material world and the "world of experience" is nothing but a simple model that's not helpful most of the time.
But I can surely imagine a world with all the actors, all the action, and no observers, yes. Isn't that what's called "the zombie" though experiment? But that's a though experiment that does not lead very far; soon you end up with a world of philosophical zombies who write and talk about their introspections and write whole books about consciousness, yet this imaginary world is supposed to be devoid of consciousness ; feels like a bunch of autonomous language models in a loop talking to each others add nauseam pretending to be humans, after the end of all life.
That's why in my mental model the biological phenomenon and the subjective experience are two sides of the very same coin unlike in the zombie though experiment. In practice you can't have one without the other.
I am unconvinced by your argument for the reason I gave initialy and that is nicely illustrated in that article: Your argument posits that introspection and thoughs belong firmly into the realm of consciousness. I actually believe, at the contrary, that if we wanted to have an actionable definition of conscousness we would have to free this concept from all particular biological processes such as thinking or introspecting, which certainly "color" it but do not define it. Of course we then end up with a concept of consciousness that is restricted to the immediate personal experience we have of experiencing something; the tiny tiny bit of unknown that's outside the reach of our senses and sciences, the only thing we can't observe. And the task is to articulate this mysterious bit with everything else we know.
I'm not sure if I'm making my view clearer or if I'm confusing everyone; to be fair we don't have a good vocabulary to describe what we cannot observe :)
The notion that consciousness is inherently linked to a clumsy homunculus in our mind that we call an "observer" is itself faulty. This "observer" is an entirely artificial construction that our minds engage in, and subjective experience at its most basic can exist without it. This is the arahant's perception: "In the seeing, there is only the seen; in the hearing, there is only the heard; in the sensing, there is only the sensed; in the cognizing, there is only the cognized. Thus you should see that – indeed there is no thing here; this, Bahiya, is how you should train yourself. ... As you see that there is no thing there, you will see that – you are therefore located neither in the world of this, nor in the world of that, nor in any place – betwixt the two. This alone is the end of suffering." (Gautama Buddha's teaching of Bahiya, as recorded in the Udana.)
As a very rough and basic intuition of this, think about how your basic perceptions might work when you're in the "zone" or in "flow" or a deep hyperfocus state, where the ordinary "default mode network" is temporarily made inactive. Do you ever think then about some clumsy intermediating "observer" that your "seeing, hearing, sensing, cognizing" must all be passing through? Of course not; that would instantly snap you out of your intense focus. Yet you're undeniably conscious, not a "zombie" of any sort! Your qualia are unaltered; if anything, they're perhaps being more intensely experienced.