Quote:
Originally Posted by Lyander 
You say that there is no reason to believe that we fall into infinite regress if we posit an "I". We most certainly do. Why? Because you posit the "I" as the thing in the body that makes sense of the sensory world around us you then leav the question begging as to how this "I" does it, and the answer your forced into is another "I" and so on - infinite regress. You created the problem in the first place by saying that there was an "I" independent of the brain. The "I" is an incoherent concept.
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I think you get into a sort of infinite regress (which bottoms out at the atomic level) if you stick to physical explanations, because physical explanations of consciousness always boil down to information processing and signal transmission. It seems impossible to get a physical description of the end process when 'I' see an image that I like, or hear a piece of music, etc.
The infinite regress is not there if you get away from totally physical explanations because the 'I' doesn't consist of physical components that can be disassembled.
I don't think being aware of being conscious is the point here. The point is that there seems to be no way to envisage creating an artifact that is aware. Yes, you can make a computer that is aware of the room temperature (say), but that is really only a convenient turn of phrase - it isn't using the word 'aware' in the same sense.
To my mind, there are a whole set of words that are used in an analogical way when referring to computers (your feedback loop sounds utterly computer-like), and which should not be confused with the meaning as applied to conscious beings. Words such as aware, intelligent, knows, likes, wants, refuses, tries, etc.
It is exactly this distinction that the philosopher David Chalmers is referring to with his idea of qualia.
David