I'm in the same boat with you.

It's entirely too much to put in a Hacker News comment, but if I had to phrase my beliefs as precisely as possible, it would be something like:

  > "Phenomenal consciousness arises when a self-organizing system with survival-contingent valence runs recurrent predictive models over its own sensory and interoceptive states, and those models are grounded in a first-person causal self-tag that distinguishes self-generated state changes from externally caused ones."

I think that our physical senses and mental processes are tools for reacting to valence stimuli. Before an organism can represent "red"/"loud" it must process states as approach/avoid, good/bad, viable/nonviable. There's a formalization of this known as "Psychophysical Principle of Causality."

Valence isn't attached to representations -- representations are constructed from valence. IE you don't first see red and then decide it's threatening. The threat-relevance is the prior, and "red" is a learned compression of a particular pattern of valence signals across sensory channels.

Humans are constantly generating predictions about sensory input, comparing those predictions to actual input, and updating internal models based on prediction errors. Our moment-to-moment conscious experience is our brain's best guess about what's causing its sensory input, while constrained by that input.

This might sound ridiculous, but consider what happens when consuming psychedelics:

As you increase dose, predictive processing falters and bottom-up errors increase, so the raw sensory input goes through increasing less model-fitting filters. At the extreme, the "self" vanishes and raw valence is all that is left.