https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussi ... ent/895692
The Meta-management Theory of Consciousness uses the computational metaphor of cognition to provide an explanation for access consciousness, and by doing so explains some aspects of the phenomenology of consciousness. For example, it provides explanations for:
1) intentionality of consciousness - why consciousness "looks through" to first-order perceptions etc.
2) causality - that consciousness is "post-causal" - having no causal power over the event to which we are conscious, but having direct causal effect on subsequent events.
3) limited access - why we only have conscious experience associated with certain aspects of brain processing. — Malcolm Lett
I'm not competent to critique your theory, much less to "roast" it. So, I'll just mention a few other attempts at computer analogies to human sentience.
The April issue of Scientific American magazine has an article by George Musser entitled A Truly Intelligent Machine. He notes that "researchers are modeling AI on human brains". And one of their tools is modularity : mimicking the brain's organization into "expert" modules, such as language and spatio-visual, which normally function independently, but sometimes merge their outputs into the general flow of cognition. He says, "one provocative hypothesis is that consciousness is the common ground". This is a reference to Global Workspace Theory (GWT) in which specialty modules, e.g. math & language, work together to produce the meta-effect that we experience as Consciousness. Although he doesn't use the fraught term, this sounds like Holism or Systems Theory.
Musser asks, in reference to GWT computers, "could they inadvertently create sentient beings with feelings and motivations?" Then, he quotes the GWT inventor, "conscious computing is a hypothesis without a shred of evidence". In GWT, the function of Meta-management might be to integrate various channels of information into a singular perspective. When those internal sub-streams of cognition are focused on solving an external problem, we call it "Intention". And when they motivate the body to act with purpose to make real-world changes, we may call it "Causality". Some robots, with command-line Intentions and grasping hands, seem to have the autonomous power to cause changes in the world. But the ultimate goal of their actions can be traced back to a human programmer.
In 1985, computer theorist Marvin Minsky wrote The Society of Mind, postulating a collection of "components that are themselves mindless" that might work together to produce a Meta-manager (my term) that would function like human Consciousness. In his theory, their modular inputs & outputs would merge into a Stream of Consciousness (my term). Yet one book review noted that : "You have to understand that, for Minsky, explaining intelligence is meaningless if you cannot show a line of cookie crumbs leading from the 'intelligent' behavior to a set of un-intelligent processes that created it. Clearly, if you cannot do that, you have made a circular argument." {my italics}
In computer engineer/philosopher Bernardo Kastrup's 2020 book, Science Ideated, he distinguishes between "consciousness and meta-consciousness". Presumably, basic sentience is what we typically label as "sub-consciousness". He then notes that meta-C is a re-representation of subconscious elements that are directed by Awareness toward a particular question or problem. He also discusses the counterintuitive phenomenon of "blindsight", in which patients behave as-if they see something, but report that they were not consciously aware of the object. This "limited access" may indicate that a> subconscious Cognition and b> conscious Awareness are instances of a> isolated functions of particular neural modules, and b> integrated functions of the Mind/Brain system as a whole.
