Obviously - or else they wouldn’t advance the theory! 
Explain?
Yes, but you just said that without explaining consciousness, these theories are flawed. Which is pretty much a snap judgement. If it’s not, what’s the basis?
You earlier implied that working memory was being able to “recite your surroundings”. It’s not just short-term memory. Working memory involves 1)storage 2)updating 3)attention/inhibition and 4)attention-switching. A “self” would require these other abilities, not just “reciting”.
If we are conscious, then our brain needs to have mechanisms to contain consciousness. For our brain to have such mechanisms, it must have evolved them. The actual mechanism may be beyond current human understanding of the sciences, but it exists nonetheless and continue to work its miraculous effects.
Maybe I can provide another example that illustrates the same concept. Everytime DNA is replicated, one strand at each end is shorter than the other because of the way the enzymes work. This has the potential to kill off a species since your gametes would have significantly shorter DNA that would be ineffective in its job. So, some cells have telomerase (hmm, considering this discussion, thats a pretty ironic name :)) which extends the longer end so that the normal enzymes have more room to work in to lengthen the shorter end up to the normal length.
If a mechanism must exist for human life as we know it now to occur, such a mechanism will have evolved.
Do you know at what sites LSD binds to cause other effects? From what you said above, LSD prevents sensory overload which seems contradictory to its effects.
Your surroundings is pretty inconsequential. If you were placed in a sensory-deprivation chamber you would still be conscious. Being conscious is to be self-aware in your current moment of thought. To me, its a much more introspective phenomenon then one dependent on your surroundings and your ability to recite them or be conscious of them. Being conscious of your surroundings actually makes no sense. What does that entail? Being self-aware of your surroundings? That would only hold true as a definition of consciousness if your surroundings were you, but they are not.
Serotonin inhibits the traffic in the Raphe Nuclei. LSD acts as a partial agonist by binding to the 5HT receptors. Since serotonin has an inhibiting action at the 5HT receptors, LSD, being a partial agonist will cause disinhibition to take place.
The telomerase are just there since duplication doesn’t occur from the beginning of a chromosome, so they act as dispensible DNA.
No. Being aware of your surroundings. Consciousness isn’t restricted to awareness of self.
Ok. Are you arguing against my point or the specifics of the example?
Please expound.
Being aware of one’s surroundings isn’t one of the fundamentals of consciousness (at least not to me). Everything, animate or not is aware of its surroundings. If they were not, the world would fall apart. Electrons are “aware” of a nucleus or specifically the fact that theres a positive charge somewhere out there and they gather themselves into probability clouds based on that.
Neither. I’m not sure how the telomeres example fits in this discussion.
Whoa! How do you get this? The term awareness does not have the same connotations in particle-world as in nervous system awareness (like you imply with the brackets). The conscious awareness is an extension, built up from the fundamental kind of awareness. But we don’t need to solve the fundamental awareness in order to understand the CNS awareness.
…like you imply with the quotes… Duh :smack:
What then do you mean by awareness of your surroundings?
Taking in sensory & tactile input internally & externally (this includes proprioception), processing them, forming a coherent sensorimotor image that is useful in helping the organism anticipate and plan future motor action. This is surroundings awareness. If you add metacognition to the mix, you get consciousness. Metacognition is being aware that you possess the former ability.
Isn’t it enough for you to be self-aware that you are self-aware. It doesn’t require awareness of your surroundings yet you are still fully conscious.
Self-aware of what?
Self-aware of yourself. Yea, it just got circular. 
So who is it fooling?
Cause and effect are, presumably, the inductive explantions for sequential events. The problem with free will is that it cannot be studied scientifically. If it could, it would be deterministic. So we must either accept determinism (and who knows why anyone would, but they do) or accept that our naturalisms will always be incomplete, and some borders might be found earlier than others. Since I don’t believe science is the whole of epistemology I have no preference myself.
My two cents:
Have you seen every physics department in the world throwing massive parties with huge conga lines of scientists in the streets blocking traffic and coolers of gator-ade being dumped over Nobel-laureates’ heads? If you haven’t, it is because there is no unified theory linking micro physics with macro physics. The brain is a macro physics thingie. It’s like that damn cat in the box. The cat isn’t probabilistically alive–no one has figured out how to link the behavior of the quantum phenomenon with the cat in any meaningful sense. There is a lot of quantum gobbelty-gook going on in the brain, just as there is quantum gobbelty-gook going on everywhere, but that doesn’t mean that we know how to link it to macro thingies. That’s what string theorists are trying to do, and they are a long way from accomplishing the task.
I did not mean to limit the definition of consciousness to surroundings. Let me use the surroundings as a for example when I say “there is a difference between being capable of reciting your surroundings and actually being conscious of them.” A sufficiently complex computer running a sufficiently complex program can (in theory) sample various inputs analogous to our 5 senses (camera, microphone, etc) and describe its surroundings in plain English, but that does nothing to say whether there is actually a consciousness observing the computer’s surroundings. However I see that this point has already been addressed much more elegantly:
Now as to the nature of memory itself…
…I realize that we have separate short-term and long-term memory functions, but that is beside my point. Let me elaborate on my definition of memory. Speaking exclusively from personal experience here, I find that there are 2 types of memory. One type is the ability to retrieve such things as names, numbers, shapes etc. plainly, matter-of-fact, and unfeeling. I call this dry-facts memory. Dry-facts memory is what we use when we say “so-and-so lived in such-and-such city in whatever particular year.” Dry-facts memory is what fails us when we say “why can’t I remember that person’s name?”
The other type is the feeling/knowing of having actually experienced a certain sensation, event, place, whatever. For example, look at a red object and then close your eyes - not only do you retain the dry-facts memory that the object was red, you also retain the memory of actually experienceing that particular color. That’s actually-experienced-it memory. Actually-experienced-it memory is what we experience when we hear a song from many years ago or smell a fragrance we haven’t encountered in a long time.
I’m not disputing the concept that dry-facts type memory is exclusively a product of the brain, nor do I doubt that a computer could emulate it if the hardware & software developers had enough time on their hands to prepare such a machine. But the actually-experienced-it type memory is obviously related to consciousness somehow. And its existence is just as elusive as consciousness itself.
This isn’t very clear to me. Are you saying that remembering a portrait seen 3 years ago is “experienced-it” memory?
Memory is generally divided into two main categories: explicit and implicit. Explicit is all that we can consciously recall: a name, a mental picture of how my home looked 3 years ago, the feeling experienced during one’s first kiss…etc Implicit is what we aren’t consciously aware of. How to hold a pen and write, the usage of grammar to construct meaningful communicative sentences, how to ride a bike. In short, your core mental activities are implicit memories.
I’m not sure what the difference is between remembering a name and a picture. Both are reconstructions of categorized contextualized information. The mental picture seems richer because there’s a lot more data encompassing different sensory modalities and emotions that closely resemble current experience, whereas a name is either mentally sounded or pictured when remembered and is limited in richness. But the underlying nature of the type of memories isn’t different.
Maybe Mary can tell you.
I’ve read that paper before with regards to color qualia. But I’m not sure what difference does it make.
Oh and IIRC, the author accepted physicalism a few years later. I’ll dig up a cite.
I didn’t mean as per Plato’s cave where theres an organized system of deceit in play but rather as a misunderstanding of consciousness on our own part. What I meant was that the fact that we correlate consciousness with our own selves is false. So the only thing being fooled is our own neural circuits.
Consciousness (self-awareness) and free-will (choice without influence) appear to be two peas of one pod- the pod being a mechanism that defies classical mechanics. The correlation between this and the randomness theorized in quantum theory is striking. Would this very random nature be the core of self? Are we the randomness personified?