The following is a plausible hypothesis of how the brain creates consciousness with many different aspects working together to form our experience of reality:
Piecing together the currently popular theories suggests the following general picture for how the brain creates consciousness, proceeding from the neuron to society:
- Neural circuits organize statistical input and output: The brain is processing sensory input and generating motor output on a continual basis, functioning basically as a statistical information processing and prediction machine.
- Memory constructs a dynamic model of the world: One aspect of how the brain works is that it generates an interactive dynamic model of the world based on the statistical information received from the senses. This model includes an understanding of the environment, a representation of the physical body itself (body image; the way you know your hand is yours and not somebody else's), a representation of other beings in the social world (parents, friends, society, animals), and ultimately a representation of oneself. The representation of oneself may be an extension of social modeling reflected back onto oneself (the purported owner of one's perceptual experiences); it may also be the "actor" responsible for the observed behavior represented by the body image (perception of "agency").
- Information integration unifies coherent perception: One aspect of the "conscious field" is that it appears unified, complete, coherent, and self-aware, even though experiments show it is not. This may be made possible by extensive feedback pathways within the brain, which exchange information between brain areas, unify perception into a single coherent point of view, and drive the brain's representation of the body's identity toward a consistent model of goal-directed voluntary action.
- Episodic memory creates identity through personal narrative: In humans in particular, "one-shot memory" is able to store an episodic record of the events we experience along with causal models and explanations. This "episodic memory" is organized into a multi-layer narrative on many time scales. Our knowledge of our own personal history forms our identity of who we are, which further supports our understanding of that entity, which is being aware, experiencing perceptions, and causing actions — our "self."
- Social structure reinforces a model of reality and agency: Society and human culture further reinforce this "mutually developed" model of who we are, who other people are, who they think we are, what we think they think of us, etc. There are many levels of recurrent nesting of representations of our personal and social identities, both within our own brain and distributed across the brains of our family, community, and social relations.
- Language codifies social reality and supports transmission of cultural beliefs: All of this is brought into a crisp structured social-conceptual framework using language. Language is a culturally-transmitted conceptual system with a spontaneously developed sequential coding scheme (words and grammar). Language allows society to operate within a common belief system that is kept synchronized across individuals. This belief system includes concepts such as personal responsibility, intentional action, truth, knowledge, and other core belief frameworks that provide a foundation to our conscious experience.
Thus the brain plays a role in generating and maintaining a model of the world that includes "us," and also includes "us" believing we are having self-aware experiences. In modern human society, this is further supported by a shared reality and belief system that we acquire from infancy through cultural transmission, human language, episodic memory, and personal identity.
How Does The Brain Create Consciousness?
That's an answer to a question asked on Quora. Obviously not a single citation to the literature is provided, nor does it provide any explanation of how consciousness is produced by any phenomena such as neural circuits, memory or "information integration".
Quotes from the next two answers to the question (my bolding):
Yohan John, PhD in Cognitive and Neural Systems from Boston University
Does the brain create consciousness? I'm not so sure. At the very least, I know that no neuroscientist has caught the brain 'red-handed' in the act of creating consciousness.
And:
Craig Weinberg
In my view, to ask how the brain creates consciousness is like asking how an abacus creates math. The brain has its own context which has little to do with us. We use the brain, and our awareness is limited and shaped by its function, but there is no reason to suppose that any part of the brain even knows that we exist.
Many have understood that there is a problem with connecting the activities of neurons or molecules with direct experiences such as colors and flavors. I grew up with a materialistic view and was unaware that there were other possibilities, except for religious views. I did not know that many philosophers throughout history had intelligent arguments which brought materialism into doubt, but eventually I began to develop questions about materialism on my own. The most problematic issue in my mind was why something like a brain or a body should feel anything at all, when all of its functions can be explained without any such feelings. Without knowing it, I had stumbled upon what David Chalmers famously called "The Hard Problem" of consciousness.
Since that time, I have put together a synthesis of ideas from many different disciplines to come up with a solution that I think might be crazy enough to be on the right track. If I'm right, the brain does not create consciousness, nor do cells or molecules, but rather consciousness or sense is the fundamental condition of all possible existence (including physical objects, information, and subjectivity).
https://www.quora.com/How-does-the-brain-create-consciousness
So, if you are claiming that the answer you quoted is more "plausible" than what I have bolded here, please state that argument.
By the way, Yohan John links to a highly interesting paper on the "integrated information" hypothesis of Tononi and Koch (subsequently noting that "Tononi and Koch seem to have bitten the bullet and accepted a form of panpsychism)":
Abstract: If you’re a materialist, you probably think that rabbits are conscious. And you ought to think that. After all, rabbits are a lot like us, biologically and neurophysiologically. If you’re a materialist, you probably also think that conscious experience would be present in a wide range of alien beings behaviorally very similar to us even if they are physiologically very different. And you ought to think that. After all, to deny it seems insupportable Earthly chauvinism. But a materialist who accepts consciousness in weirdly formed aliens ought also to accept consciousness in spatially distributed group entities. If she then also accepts rabbit consciousness, she ought to accept the possibility of consciousness even in rather dumb group entities. Finally, the United States would seem to be a rather dumb group entity of the relevant sort. If we set aside our morphological prejudices against spatially distributed group entities, we can see that the United States has all the types of properties that materialists tend to regard as characteristic of conscious beings.
If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious - Eric Schwitzgebel