Contrary to popular belief I believe the human mind simple and consciousness is not a mystery because there is nothing truly special or unique about either.
Simply put a mind has two parts:
- Newtonian physics model with a dynamic reference frame that allows the hierarchical Russian Doll stacking of object models. This powers all our locomotion and traversal of the world as 3D creatures.
- A model of social agents. These models are layered on top of the mechanical physics model to predict what people and animals will do as mechanical actors. What we call a self is simply a more detailed root model of a social agent that we copy paste and alter the parameters of to predict other agents. We see human agents everywhere because we literally project an altered model of ourselves to understand motive thereby predict mechanical action.
Consciousness is just the log of predictions being made by our model of self being mapped to the low level models that do work.
All life has “consciousness” its just that simpler social agents have simpler models and thereby simpler models of self.