What the heck is consciousness anyway?

[Bear]

To be honest I got frustrated with consciousness theories in my undergrad.

Me too. Most of those theories seemed to me very groundless, very much suppositions in the absence of knowledge.

All proposals just redefine consciousness but don't account for quaila. Your context proposal for example: what about that system generates quaila compared to other systems? And more importantly how would one test for it?

I think that the subjective experience of desiring things is a fundamental symptom of consciousness, and that qualia are emergent as a means by which brains organize information about the world pursuant to meeting those desires. In the absence of a goal, information is meaningless. But when the information is meaningful, it's meaningful because survival or meeting one's needs depends on having a way to interpret, relate, and integrate it.

As for how to test for it, or even for detecting what qualia are as opposed to information? That's difficult. I think I suppose that qualia are much more integrated into the way everything else works, while information is a set of symbols that an intelligence can manipulate to the degree that intelligence is present. So if I were testing for whether or not something were 'qualia' I'd probably be looking for the degree of its integration with the rest of the system.

But according to someone else, 'qualia' doesn't necessarily mean what I think it means; as a subjective concept it resists definition.