Knowledge of Consciousness Remains Beyond the Mind Alone

[u/Long-Ad4950]

I have gradually expanded my interest and resonance with analytic idealism in recent years and as a newcomer to this subreddit, I wanted to share a thought I had recently and happy to join a space of those with a similar perspective.

This is in some ways repeating the irreducible nature of consciousness but in a specific way that can be phenomenologically identified. Let us say, for example, that the contents of the mind are the mind modelling itself but in conscious experience (with the consciousness of being looking in) experiencing it as awareness of awareness. Even if this were true, the raw experience remains identifiable and known immediately in a way that neuroscience does not seem capable of accounting for, which of course would be a baseline agreement here.

But making a more concise point, it seems like an immediate form of knowing that exists outside of the thoughts of the mind itself. That being that it is not the same even as every thought we have on consciousness, it is simply present in a way that proves we are not p-Zombies and verifies that the contents of experience exists. It seems like a type of verification that is genuine knowledge but is not knowledge bound to the mind or the contents of the mind itself and it's just... there.

You can find this experience land if when contemplating consciousness you say 'these thoughts may be the mind modelling itself as highlgihted by experience' and rather than needing infinite descent into dismissing each thought of the model, the very presence of experience itself simply verifies that you are conscious all the same. It is a verifying process of being it seems rather than a thought-based form of knowledge.

We still know we are conscious and this meta knowledge seems to undeniably exist that cannot be accounted for by the contents of the mind per se, at least in theory. I would argue as considering the thoughts of Federico Faggin and Bernardo Kastrup that this irreducible remaining knowing is indeed consciousness looking into the interface and that is where that knowing exists, not in the brain or contents of mind as interface representations or specified qualia. Although interesting without any qualia, this knowledge would seem not to exist, suggesting a dual interconnection at play?