"Consciousness used to be the crazy aunt in psychology's attic. Behaviorists and cognitive scientists alike practiced denial, but the squeaking floorboards troubled our dreams of a truly scientific discipline. Now, the old lady has been given pride of place in the parlor, with all the respectable scientific furnishing of societies and journals. But let's face it--she's still weird."
http://www.slate.com/id/2275645/pagenum/all/
My first comment will be on the lack of disclaimer. You should have made a posting that said if you want rock your mind and give yourself a headache in the process proceed, otherwise do not click. I find that it is really hard to comment on this link because so much is being said. The writer of this article does a terrific job of propping an idea up then poetically points to the flaws and the discrepancies within the theories involving the BIG C. I find that I don’t feel comfortable making a conjecture or even a guess on how and why the BIG C exists. In truth, I don’t think we will ever know. I find that I do agree that consciousness is intertwined with the perception of the self. I don’t think any organism is capable of encoding information and not processing it in relation to itself. While we may shut off when viewing and diving into a movie, I do think when credits are being shown, we attempt to relay the new found information to ourselves. We mull it over, we think about the relevance of what we just saw, its impact on us, we hold it like a new toy examine it and its importance to the self. And in my simple way I guess that to me is consciousness us in relation to the world, and the world in relation to us. But I don’t think I can say more than because of my submission to modesty and a fear of stepping into the unknown.
I can see where you're coming from but consciousness is not an area that we ought to give up on. As soon as we can define what it is, we'll be able to study it better. But some components have already been studied so the case is not as hopeless as we think. Though I don't really know if consciousness will ever enter the 'empirical' arena.
I sort of agree with what you're saying about watching a movie. But here's the thing, when someone is talking next to us when we're watching, isn't that really distracting and we don't feel like we connect as well with the movie? While we're watching the movie, I don't think we think of ourselves, we're submerged in the experiences of the character we've identified with.
I love consciousness. It's one of those big areas in psychology. I especially like sleep research, partially because sleep disorders are really interesting. But the answer is always simple. We dream around when our eyes start to move around and our body is paralyzed. We sleep walk in a totally different section of the night. Etc. I like hypnosis too. I was inspired when I was doing one of the Ted Talks, by Keith Barry who is a professional illusionist. One of the things he does is hypnosis and he can induce instant amnesia, instant inability talk or hear. I was effected by this and tried self-hypnosis on youtube. Though, I don't think I did it quite right...
Seriously, though, consciousness is weird. Demasio is quite right, unless we find a nice explanation for it, we're not really going to ever be able to test it. Like consciousness would seemingly involve the self. Demasio points out that when we're watching a movie, the self circuits are shut off. So, what's going on when we're watching a movie, we go unconscious or something?
Actually, I've seen literature that bolsters just that idea.