Let's use modern computers as a metaphor. Not that I'm positing that we're Turing machines (or that we're not).
The brain would be the hardware. The processors, wires, links to the power supply.
The codified rules such has how you see, language, instinct, etc would be the software. The wrinkle would be that the software can modify itself -- think a computer that can write new subroutines to improve it's abilities, learn new things, pattern match the environment,etc. There would be two kinds of software -- hardcoded (keeping your heart breathing, etc) and softcoded (modifiable at run time).
Neither of these are conscious on their own.
What I'm positing is the act of the mental software while being executed in the hardware is consciousness. The process itself.
This is why consciousness goes away when you turn off the brain, and why it may never come back the same even if you turn it back on.
You've described very clearly the essentials of a widely held contemporary hypothesis about what consciousness is. What you refer to as "
the act of the mental software" seems to me, however, to be "
the act of the mind in finding what will suffice" (in the words of Wallace Stevens, from the poem copied below) -- and mind operates at the level of higher-order thought as demonstrated in philosophy, science, and other disciplines. In my own experience, thinking (even about complex philosophical issues) continues even in dreaming, a state in which the subconscious is generally hypothesized to produce the content (imagery, narrative, feeling, etc). James Carpenter, in
First Sight: ESP and Parapsychology in Everyday Life (called to our attention yesterday by Jeff) sees the subconscious as also capable of thinking.
If so, consciousness is a complex of activity operating at various levels, including the personal subconscious, the collective unconscious, and the 'waking' state we (generally) inhabit in ordinary daytime awareness of our embodied existence. My point is that consciousness is not a simple 'on or off' phenomenon but includes a wider, more global, and deeper connection with the world in which we find ourselves existing, a connection on many levels with 'information' received by us on many levels and in distinctive ways.
For example, what the collective unconscious gathers and endows us with is information that has been received and retained from far back in our own evolution (some of which has been made comprehensible by Jung). So consciousness, both active and latent or subliminal, seems to me to function on the basis of innumerable and various acts of engagement with something beyond itself -- with the actual, palpable natural world (and in time the cultural worlds) in which we have evolved. This is a phenomenological perspective on human experience in a real world in which consciousness has entered the scene relatively recently, evolving from protoconscious exchanges of information in physical systems beginning at the quantum level (or perhaps at a still lower substrate), evolving to the level of higher-order thought -- mind -- in which we ask increasingly complex questions about the nature of what-is and, as a collective working on the same philosophical and scientific problems, develop increasingly refined understandings of the nature of reality. We think "new thoughts" as you observed in your post quoted above, and we think them on the basis of deeper and deeper knowledge of the world (and about ourselves) reached through our questions {M-P would say our 'interrogations'} of nature and 'reality'.
None of that could have happened {and been retained in memory at various levels of 'consciousness') if we did not experience the world directly. It is out of that direct contact, that embeddedness in nature contemplated by embodied minds, that we ask the questions that yield answers on the basis of which we claim knowledge about the world, and about ourselves (though we are less advanced at this point in understanding what we are).
Sorry for that lengthy response from the stream of my own consciousness. You also stated at the end of your post that
This is why consciousness goes away when you turn off the brain, and why it may never come back the same even if you turn it back on.
The marvel is that it usually does 'come back the same', as in recovery from anesthesia and coma and 'brain death' in some medical crises. We are almost instantly restored to the memories that are vivid and coherent traces of our own experiences in the world to date, many of which are not our 'own' memories but those of past lives we recall in hypnotic states, and of the collective struggle to make sense of the world recorded in our collective unconscious. Hegel referred to consciousness as 'spirit' (in
The Phenomenology of Spirit [Geist]). Wallace Stevens concludes in one of his phenomenological poems that "the spirit comes from the body of the world." In phenomenological philosophy, consciousness and mind are filled with the world. In recent thinking in science and consciousness studies, consciousness and mind might express nature's deep interactive informational structure, which we alike embody and express as a result of our entanglement in the information that constitutes the world. Thus theories that consciousness is nothing more than software in the brain seem to me to be incommensureable with the world as we experience it and think it at many levels of 'consciousness'.
This is my only point with respect to reality, when I stated that it was up for grabs. Not certainly in some cartoonish outland wherein one can do or be anything one's blessed little new age heart can handle, albeit a little Gnosticism is something that IMO we could all profit by.
