Apply a weak electric current to a specific point and people get the sensation they are being watched. It's not a perception it's altering post processing of sensory data. A stroke can remove your ability recognize faces. You could still describe someone, but you would not be able to look at a picture of you wife and know who they where. You would be able to recognize her voice.
These are not in the two category's proposed earlier, thus memory and observation fail fully describe what's going on.
yeah, you're definitely off topic. Prosopagnosia is an interesting phenomenon but it's not related to what Bloom was discussing or what I was elaborating on.
Bloom's discussion was a highlighting of the ways in which cultural transmission of events imbues the sensory perception and recollection of memory in every person in society with a certain kind of filter which he describes by analogy as if it was some sort of group mind.
my point of elaboration was meant to emphasize that when we examine the contents of consciousness, we necessarily are limited to examining our own consciousness qualitatively. Reporting on the consciousness of others is only ever capable of producing yet another stimulus in our own input stream that we would interpet the same way we interpret any other exogenous stimulus. Despite that, this does not imply solipsism. Only an admission of the limitations we are faced with in this examination.
What's off topic about pointing out that this interesting model of the world which you just repeated is wrong? Our brains have plenty of redundancy, but cells die and this really does impact what's going on. Radiation is randomly altering your brain at low levels that very rarely become noticeable, thinking of it in these ideal terms is pointless.
> we necessarily are limited to examining our own consciousness qualitatively
Err no. It's just as much a physical things as a rock or your toenails.
PS: The modern CPU your using to read this is to complex for any one person to understand. It has billions of connections all doing important things some of which don't work. But, it was designed so each connection is intended to do something understandable. Further, it's way to fast to understand what's going on at a second by second basis, but every individual interaction is predictable. So, that CPU is to complex to understand, but that does not mean your limited to looking at it qualitatively.
Brain state = mind. Running program = computer state.
Both are physical things. An abacus does not undergo long term change when you move the beads. But, the arangment of beads can have meaning. Brains and CPU both treat the intermediate state as something meaningful and act on it.
These are not in the two category's proposed earlier, thus memory and observation fail fully describe what's going on.