Comment by hackinthebochs

Yeah, its tough to know what a good explanation would even look like. There are so many ways for one thing to resemble another, it's hard to conceive of a new class of resemblance prior to being given an example of it. Resemblance can also depends on one's prior commitments. So its a very dynamic and context dependent property. I don't think there is much hope in identifying what a satisfying explanation of consciousness will look like prior to be presented with one.

That said, I can offer what I take to be a narrowing of the target of promising avenues of investigation. We need a new way to conceptualize existence outside of "thing-based" ontologies. A process ontology would be heading in the right direction. This will perhaps give us the tools to conceptualize a recurrent information-rich dynamical system as a thing in itself (rather than as a collection of individuals with some dynamical behavior). Then we can ask how distinctions are presented to the system on which its behavior and decision-making is determined. A represented distinction is predicated on it being like something or something else to the consumer of the representation such that states can be distinguished. We wouldn't necessarily subjectively resemble this system, but we may recognize our epistemic situation regarding being the target of represented distinctions so that we are confident there is something it is like to be that system.