The Hard Problem of Consciousness

When I was little, I used to think all the time about the Universe. This hasn't ever changed. Understanding the universe as it is, without any kind of prejudice, is imperative. But back in the 4th grade I used to consider only the objective, physical world - how did the Universe begin? What is the Big Bang? How does the physical world work? Do you really need mathematics to describe the world or can you use some other tool to do it?

This was happening ever since I was very young, like I said above, around 4th grade. But I never concerned myself with questions about consciousness or qualia, the subjective part of the world - the fact that we can see colors, feel touch, hear sound, smell a flower, taste chocolate, love, be sad, having an inner voice talk inside your head, imagine the future, plan, study, learn, memorize, remember, and on and on. It never occured to me that these things should require an explanation, for whatever reason. I always took them for granted. And this persisted for a very long time - until a few years ago when Cristi Stoica had a Facebook post about the hard problem of consciousness. Of course, this is well known in the scientific world for quite some time, first formulated (to my knowledge) by philosopher David Chalmers. But to me it seemed kind of ridiculous - I would simply say "consciousness arises when the complexity of a nervous system becomes big enough" and be done with it. However, after discussing this with him, Liviu Coconu and Igor Salom, it became immediately clear that I have been completely ignorant on the issues that such a statement has. Can a computer be conscious, if it becomes complex enough? Can a Turing Machine become conscious if it reads symbols written in the sand, if that is complex enough? What's needed for something to be conscious? And then, endless questions arise from that.

Back to Chalmers and his take on the problem, his idea is very simple: how can something subjective like consciousness or qualia (the subjective, intimate sensations like touch, smell, sight and so on) arise from something material? How can a body made out of objective physical stuff like protons, neutrons, electrons, molecules and so on bring about something subjective like qualia? Is the material world fundamental, and consciousness is an emergent phenomenon? Or is consciousness fundamental and the physical world is confabulated by consciousness? Are we talking about materialized mind or spiritualized matter?

In this post I will talk about consciousness, qualia, and propose a mechanism through which the hard problem of consciousness could be solved. I will then discuss what are the possible implications of the proposed mechanisms, some of which are really spectacular (and possibly fascinating or crazy, depending on your personal inclinations). The proposal is scientific in the sense that it can be probed and falsified scientifically, maybe not right now but in the future.

I personally consider the hard problem of consciousness as being the greatest mystery of all time. More of a mystery than free will or why is there something rather than nothing. After all, we've already covered these two previously. Besides proposing a mechanism for how qualia can arise, I will also propose a way through which we can have true free will in the philosophical sense.

Needless to say, this is a very difficult topic to write about so you'll have to excuse possible inconsistencies or errors. I am not a scientist and this is not a scientific paper - it's more of a "here's what I think about this" kind of document - it implies no particular scientific rigor. To be completely honest, this topic deserves an entire book, but I will try to compress it in this post.

Qualia

First, let's take a look at the definition of qualia. I'm going to take it straight out of Wikipedia:

In philosophy and certain models of psychology, qualia (/ˈkwɑːliə/ or /ˈkweɪliə/; singular form: quale) are defined as individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term qualia derives from the Latin neuter plural form (qualia) of the Latin adjective quālis (Latin pronunciation: [ˈkʷaːlɪs]) meaning "of what sort" or "of what kind" in a specific instance, such as "what it is like to taste a specific apple, this particular apple now".

Examples of qualia include the perceived sensation of pain of a headache, the taste of wine, as well as the redness of an evening sky. As qualitative characters of sensation, qualia stand in contrast to "propositional attitudes",^[1] where the focus is on beliefs about experience rather than what it is directly like to be experiencing.

Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett once suggested that qualia was "an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us".^[2]

In other words, qualia represents hard to describe elements of reality, ineffable, in fact, yet things that are directly experienced like taste or smell or love. They cannot be communicated to other persons directly, only by analogy. If you've never experienced a particular qualia, there is no way (I claim) for you to understand it other than having a direct experience of it.

To make it fun, I always use the following example: if you've never experienced an orgasm and someone tells you what an orgasm is, you'll never know what it is. You need to experience one "first hand" in order to truly understand it. No collection of words can give you that experience. And I think, as an aside, that a lot of pain and suffering in the world is due to the fact that we can't experience other people's qualia - we can't live in their bodies and understand what they really feel, what it's like to be them.

Philosophical Zombies

Continuing with the topic of qualia, one has to wonder how and when did it arise. Also, why did it arise? What purpose could it possibly have? To answer this, we can take a teleological look at Nature: life needs to survive and reproduce - that's its telos - its purpose, its reason of being. Qualia gives life its drive - you do stuff because it feels good, or because "you feel like doing it", and you avoid stuff because it feels bad or because "you don't feel like doing it". This is built into you by Nature. But one has to wonder why was this needed? Why wouldn't the world be populated by philosophical zombies that look and act the same as we do right now yet have no internal feeling, having no way "that it feels to be you", basically being machines executing some algorithms with no inner life?

And the truth is that it's hard to find a good reason for it, at least apparently. But when you think about it, everything you do is based on "how it feels like", even the things that appear "purely logical", as Kant would put it. Whenever you're doing something, you're doing it because you want to "feel good about it" now or later. You are solving something because it feels good, or maybe it pays you money later so you won't be hungry and feel bad, and on and on. Everything you do is based on "how you feel like", if you look at it deep enough. This is what Antonio Damasio calls somatic markers - how you feel like in the background of your "soul", so to speak.

The problem with all this is that you're only sure about your own qualia. It's possible, theoretically, that you're the only truly "living being", having an inner sensation and qualia, but all the other people, animals and so on are philosophical zombies - mere robots pretending like they have an inner world, simulations that fit the narrative. Since you can't experience their inner world directly, this is always a possibility. 

Theory of mind

So what exactly does it mean to be conscious and how did that arise? What could possibly be the evolutionary mechanism that gave rise to consciousness and why did it stick? Why would being conscious be important for evolution to keep it in the gene pool?

Well, for one, consciousness seems to be a property of the nervous system. I will discuss why I think this is the case a bit later. For now, let's take it on faith that the nervous system gives rise to consciousness. Looking at the tree of life and how evolution took place in the ~4 billion year old history of life on Earth gives a few clues: simple organisms arose at first, which then increased their complexity through billions of years, ending up with us, the most "complex" beings in the known universe that also have the ability to be conscious, sentient and have qualia.

Let's now look at a particular trait that complex mammals (and other intelligent species like crows, ravens or cetaceans) share: they all live in pretty big communities. Now why would that be important? Why would this ever be relevant for consciousness?

It turns out that living in a larger and larger group of individuals gives rise to a particular evolutionary trait - theory of mind. Theory of mind is the ability to take some other individual's perspective - putting yourself in someone else's shoes without having access to their sensory organs. For example, if you see someone that ran a marathon being all sweat up and looking at a bottle of water, you can immediately simulate that she is thirsty. You can put yourself in her shoes and realize that you would be thirsty if you were her, too. There are a particular kind of neurons called "mirror neurons" that are assumed to play this role, located in the temporoparietal junction in the human brain. Some people dispute the importance of mirror neurons for theory of mind more recently (see Robert Sapolsky in his book "Behave"), but I feel like they play an important role in allowing an individual to take some other individual's point of view.

Now why would this be relevant or important, and why would Nature select for this trait to be passed on through the evolutionary process? Well, having a theory of mind gives you a substantial evolutionary advantage: knowing (or at least simulating) what's going on in your rival's mind, or your partner's mind, or understanding the complex relationships in the group that you belong to, who to fight with, who to mate with and so on is a very important tool to have in assuring your surviving and reproducing. Hence, it is a trait selected by evolution through natural selection.

This is all wonderful but what does it have to do with consciousness? Well, it seems that even though theory of mind originally evolved to understand the brains of other individuals in the group, it can be turned inwards to understand your own mind. Not only can you make a mental model of someone else, but you can make a mental model of yourself. This is an exaptation of a natural adaptation that took place for a different purpose to this other purpose - understanding yourself, namely becoming conscious. The first time I heard about this exaptation was from VS Ramachandran and I thought it makes perfect sense. I still think this is the correct explanation for why we have consciousness. It's not that Nature selects for entities to be conscious - it's simply an adaptation from entities that have great theory of mind for a completely different purpose that is exapted in understanding their own self.

There are other examples of interesting exaptations like consciousness in completely different realms: feathers were initially used to thermically insulate animals, but then were exapted to flying. Ears seem to have appeared when reptiles evolved bigger jaws in order to eat food better, but these bigger jaws used longer bones that could vibrate under certain conditions so they were exapted for hearing. And so on.

Therefore, consciousness is the ability of a nervous system to create a mental model of yourself (your own physical body, tendencies, desires etc) and ascribe properties to it. Ok, fair enough. But how come there's a way to be you? How come there's something more than your simple physical description - there's an inner you?

The Hard Problem

There's a tremendous amount of questions that you can ask about qualia and the hard problem of consciousness - can a computer be conscious? Is consciousness isolated to the brain or can some other organ have a subjective experience, say your liver, stomach, intestine, heart? Is it just you or do other people have an inner world, too? What about animals, do they have qualia? Are they conscious? Are they sentient? Would a complex enough computer ever be conscious? What about a collection of computers? Is computational speed a limitation? What if you have an entity that thinks one thought every one trillion years - is that entity conscious? Can a physical system be conscious, or, like Joscha Bach says, only a simulation can be conscious? If so, why? Does qualia and consciousness depend on the physical material substrate, say, on a particular type of element like Carbon or can Silicon also bring consciousness about?What is qualia based on? Brain structure? Neuron type? Length? Receptor shape? Neurotransmitter shape? If you were to change the same of a neurotransmitter and its receptor, would you feel the same thing? What if I exchange all your serotonin receptors and the serotonin with oxytocin receptors and oxytocin and swap their place among each other? Is the location of particular neurons in the brain important? What if you move the neurons in substantia nigra 2 centimeters to the left? Or to the right? Would your perception of pleasure change? Is the number of neurons important or not? What if I replace one of your neurons with an artificial neuron - are you someone else? What if I replace two? What if I replace a billion? What if I replace all your neurons with artificial ones, one by one, maintaining the same brain structure? Are you still the same being? What if I connect your brain with someone else's brain and create a mega brain - would you have access to never before seen qualias and experiences? What if we put together a billion brains? If I take your neurons one by one and move them from one place to another and reconstruct your whole brain someplace else, say, teleport it, is it going to be you or someone else? What if I store your neural spacial distribution and recreate you back after you die, will it be you?

As you can see, it seems like you can come up with an infinite amount of fascinating (to me) questions. And, truth be told, the complexity of this is overwhelming. It's also time to tackle this problem head on. In the following, I will provide you my own take on how to solve this seemingly unsolvable problem.

First off, let me offer you a weird take on the problem, first heard from David Eagleman (although he specifically said he shouldn't be quoted saying this - I will make an exception for the sake of argument):

Imagine you're born in the jungle with no access to the modern world. You live with the animals in the jungle in a very small tribe and life is wonderful. One day, taking a trip through the jungle, you find a really weird device: a radio, fallen from a plane. Of course, you have no idea what that is as you've never seen such a weird thing before. You're studying it and you see a round shape on its surface. You press on that and suddenly (and scaringly) a voice starts talking from inside the weird box! You drop the box and wonder how can that be?! How can a man fit inside such a small box and talk from there? You then hear music of extraordinary complexity and realize there's more than one person inside the box. But how can that be?! It's a completely baffling event. Carefully, you decide to break the box and see what's inside. Weirdly, there's nobody in there. There's only some metal things and other materials (we're assuming you don't know what plastic is, you're a jungle man, remember?). The voices in the box also stopped, so you ascribe a causal relationship between the box and the voice (assume you're a scientifically minded aborigen that takes causality really seriously). You take the broken radio to your tribe and everybody is a little cautious and then everyone laughs at you when you tell them that a voice, then music, then more voices came from "in there". Everyone thinks you're hallucinating, that you've eaten those forbidden mushrooms again.

What this example is saying is that you wouldn't think in a million years that the actual source of the information of the voices inside the radio box was in a antenna tower 100 kilometers away, and that the information arrived in the box through "radio waves" and then that the voices were reproduced in there through electricity and magnetism. Such a thing is inconceivable for you. We might be in the same situation with qualia and the hard problem. However, this is most likely not the case. We can see that there's at least a correlation between a particular type of brain damage and a particular kind of consciousness or qualia loss. Sometimes you can do a lot of brain damage with seemingly little cognitive function loss. I claim this is not a mere correlation but a causation, and I will explain why.

One thing we need to get rid of is the idea that computational speed is essential. We know that computers do arithmetic computations really fast, much faster than the human brain. Yet computers are not conscious (at least to the best of our knowledge). So computational speed can't be a criteria, I would assert. 

Another thing we need to mention is the fact that all we experience, I claim, is the result of a mental model - a representation of the world created by our brain. Whether this actually probes the real ontology of the universe is debatable - I would say yes and explain why next, but with a caveat. I will need to be in complete agreement with Joscha Bach when he says that:

Physical things can't feel anything, it's the brain software that feels it, the story that is being created.

VS Ramachandran is proposing something similar: he's proposing that consciousness is a metarepresentation: a representation of the representation. You won't get consciousness from brain regions that process information, say, the visual or auditory cortex; instead, you need another brain region that processes the information that was processed - it interprets already interpreted sensory information, creating an integrated story of the world.

The Chorus Hypothesis 

The mechanism that I propose as the way to give rise to qualia from a material substrate is what I call The Chorus Hypothesis.

Imagine you're going to the opera and that there's one singer there. She starts singing, you hear her voice, that's it. The second time you go there are two singers that sing together. You hear their combined voices and the tone, tempo and so on is given by their collective contributions. Now imagine the third time you're going to the opera there are 86 billion singers - as much as neurons in the human nervous system. They all have their own voices individually, but when they synchronize together they create a particular, unified, continuous voice - the chorus. 

In this situation, it won't even matter than one singer out of 86 billion swears, or is talking politics, or sings a completely different tune, or is absent, or it's sleeping. Assuming it doesn't have a loud enough voice, what you will hear is the other people's combined voices minus one. No big deal, you don't even know you're missing one voice from the chorus. 

Another analogy would be to combine individual dots of blue and red. Combine them together and look at them from afar and it's going to look purple. In order to understand consciousness, we need to take a holistic approach of neural activity. 

I claim this is exactly what is happening in consciousness. The song itself is the emergent conscious mental model of what's happening: the story of the brain. But what would be the actual thing representing the chorus analogy in the brain? The answer is brain waves. My claim is that it's the brain waves that are what consciousness is. In the following I will describe why and what are some of the crazy implications of this proposal.

What are brain waves? Let me quote directly from Wikipedia (some people complain when you're quoting from Wikipedia instead of directly from scientific papers, but this will do):

Neural oscillations, or brainwaves, are rhythmic or repetitive patterns of neural activity in the central nervous system. Neural tissue can generate oscillatory activity in many ways, driven either by mechanisms within individual neurons or by interactions between neurons. In individual neurons, oscillations can appear either as oscillations in membrane potential or as rhythmic patterns of action potentials, which then produce oscillatory activation of post-synaptic neurons. At the level of neural ensembles, synchronized activity of large numbers of neurons can give rise to macroscopic oscillations, which can be observed in an electroencephalogram. Oscillatory activity in groups of neurons generally arises from feedback connections between the neurons that result in the synchronization of their firing patterns. The interaction between neurons can give rise to oscillations at a different frequency than the firing frequency of individual neurons. A well-known example of macroscopic neural oscillations is alpha activity.

Neural oscillations were observed by researchers as early as 1924 (by Hans Berger). More than 50 years later, intrinsic oscillatory behavior was encountered in vertebrate neurons, but its functional role is still not fully understood.^[1] The possible roles of neural oscillations include feature binding, information transfer mechanisms and the generation of rhythmic motor output. Over the last decades more insight has been gained, especially with advances in brain imaging. A major area of research in neuroscience involves determining how oscillations are generated and what their roles are. Oscillatory activity in the brain is widely observed at different levels of organization and is thought to play a key role in processing neural information. Numerous experimental studies support a functional role of neural oscillations; a unified interpretation, however, is still lacking.

The bold emphasis at the end is added by me: a unified interpretation, however, is still lacking. Of course, not having a unified interpretation doesn't necessarily mean that brain waves are the cause of consciousness or qualia, but this is my hypothesis. I claim that the brain waves are exactly identical to qualia - those waves are what you are. You can simply say that the precise pattern of your brain waves is the personal identity fingerprint of yourself. This is a scientific claim that can be falsified by experiment.

But how could that be? What's so special about them?

For one, I agree with Giulio Tononi that consciousness must arise as a democratic relationship between neurons, not as a sequential, isolated neural activity. For example, I claim that an artificial neural network as they are implemented right now, working sequentially, will not have consciousness. In our current neural networks, the implementation is sequential - the first layer of artificial neurons get some inputs, they pass that information to an n number of hidden layers, layer by layer, and then and output is produced. There's no democracy in this system, no continuous talk between neurons, no simultaneous contributions by the neurons. There is no chorus effect. And even if it were, it could still be in vain in creating an actual qualia in this particular system. Why would this be, though?

To answer this, we need to get back to the actual brain waves. We know we have qualia (or at least that I do - the other might be philosophical zombies). We also know we have brain waves that can be measured on an EEG (electroencephalogram). Of course, we could measure them even better with electrodes planted directly in the brain, but that might not be the most pleasant experience in the world (although the brain has no direct pain receptors).  What is so special about these patterns, about these waves? I claim that they are the software of ontology. In other words, I don't believe we're dealing with any Cartesian dualism, here. Instead, we're dealing with a pseudo-dualism: there is only one natural world, but it's made up of two different things: the hardware part and the software part. The hardware part is the material world - say quantum fields or if you prefer particles, quarks, leptons, force bosons. The software part needs the hardware part to exist, just like in a computer - in order to run your favorite game, you need a CPU, RAM, a hard drive, motherboard circuits and so on. The software part runs on this hardware part and it's these brain wave patterns. But the waves themselves are what's relevant - it doesn't matter how you make the waves, just like it doesn't matter if you play a game on a PC, a MAC, an iPhone or an Android phone. What matters is the organised nature of the software and its compatibility with the hardware (the fact that it's properly run on that hardware and is a low entropy form of information for that particular operating system). You can imagine all this as a single coin with two faces - the hardware part and the software part.

In our case, the patterns found in the brain waves probe the ontological software of the universe.

Now you might wonder why would this be? How come these particular brain waves do that and others do not. The answer to this is evolution through natural selection. Suppose you had a being that was a philosophical zombie. I claim there's not a particularly good mechanism in nature for that being to be efficient in surviving and reproducing without qualia, without an inner world. Or, at least, there's an evolutionary advantage to have such phenomena unfolding inside of you. Why? Back to Damasio's somatic markers - it's the way you feel that pushes you to do stuff or avoid other stuff, hence to survive and reproduce, hence to give these traits further as encoded information in the DNA to your offsprings.

During life's ~4 billion years journey on Earth, there might've been "living beings" without qualia - but they were quickly jettisoned out of existence through the mechanism of evolution in favor of those with qualia - in favor of those having the most rudimentary probing of the ontological software - those capable of producing the necessary "brain waves" (correspondent to their own complexity) such that they are driven by qualia, by their somatic markers, to survive and reproduce. There was also qualia natural selection at work, too - if you felt pleasure petting a lion or feel joy watching your blood spill on the floor you wouldn't survive and reproduce to give that trait forward in the gene pool hence, after 4 billion years, very few individuals feel these things in these contexts (produce brain waves in these situations such that the ontological software creates the qualia of pleasure or joy for them). With the ability to use the Universe's software through trial and error and then exapting theory of mind to examine your own mind, not just the other individuals in your group's minds, we ended up with our current situation - being able to be sentient while also having an inner sensation by having the correct way for our hardware (the neural network) to vibrate in unison to probe the ontological software. In fact, going further, you can say that the software itself is a property of the electromagnetic field, since this is where the "waving" is happening.

The take home point is this: 

There is a physical world, made out of physical stuff (quantum fields or whatever). This physical world is the hardware in the "universe computer", to keep the analogy going. Assuming you create the right pattern in the electromagnetic field (who knows if this is possible using other fields, too, although hard to see which other field you could use), then you exhibit a phenomenon compatible with the ontological software, giving rise to qualia. Add the ability to analyse the qualia and create a mental model of it through theory of mind/mirror neurons and you end up with consciousness. You can see qualia as rudimentary software and consciousness as an application based on understanding (creating models of) that rudimentary software. Your neural hardware combined with the emerging brain wave pattern is what it feels to be you.

And, indeed, you can see these brain waves change as a function of your consciousness (or your consciousness as a function of the brain waves). You have different brain waves when you're asleep as opposed to when you're awake, conscious. There are also only particular regions in the brain that are associated with consciousness - it seems that the basic property that they need to have is this democracy, this pluralism of neural contributions. At the other end, the cerebellum doesn't have this pluralism - each neuron in the cerebellum works pretty much on its own, without exchanging ideas with other neurons, like Giulio Tononi describes in his book, "Phi". 

Another advantage to having the brain waves be what it's like to be you is their unified shape - they are a continuous shape, assuming spacetime is not pixelated. What it's like to be you "now" is a matter of being in that person's reference frame and look at the snapshot of the shape of the brain waves. Of course, we are talking in principle, here. This also solves (although this can be disputed) Cristi Stoica's astute remark that consciousness has a non-local property, because the wave itself is unified - it's the whole shape that matters.

What about philosophical zombies? We just took that into account a while ago. I claim that no entity displaying brain waves of the shape that you are having (since you're only sure of your own qualia) can be a philosophical zombie, since it's probing the same ontological software as you do when it does that. I also claim that if you find an entity that acts like a human being but doesn't display the "correct" brain waves is a philosophical zombie and "there's nobody there" in their body - they are a robot with no qualia and conscious experience. What about the Turing machines or complex computers? Same deal - no consciousness, no qualia, philosophical zombies, no matter how complex they are, unless they display the correct wave patterns.

This raises some other interesting questions: can consciousness exist without life? The answer I would give is "yes", assuming that the ontological waves arise from non-living (in a classical sense) objects like computers (we'll see some other wild and crazy possibilities shortly). Does that make consciousness fundamental? Both no and yes. No, because it needs a material substrate to arise, the hardware part. Yes, because it's built into the universe as its software. And, like Bach said, it's the software that's conscious, not the hardware - that wave is "you", not the material that you're made out of. Just the simple fact that Nature allows for consciousness to arise and for qualia to exist is fundamental enough.

One can also ask "why carbon based life with qualia?". Why not some other material? The answer is that it's what best fitted the role for evolution through natural selection - it can retain its low entropy form and pass on the information to offspring to maintain the same pattern, roughly speaking - that's Nature's telos, if you want to pull a little Aristotle out of the hat.

What about pathologies? Contralateral neglect, when a stroke wipes out the entire concept of a "left side of the universe"? In this case, the input is still there but the mental model is lacking. The hardware has been damaged and it doesn't probe the software just as good. It's like destroying a particular part of your hard drive - sure, your application will still work, but some parts will crash or not do anything at all. What about animals? They are capable of accessing the ontological software, having qualia, but their mental models are rudimentary. They are therefore capable of pain, but not necessarily suffering, because a more sophisticated mental model is needed for that, including potent theory of mind focused on their own situation.

Fun/Crazy Implications of the Chorus Hypothesis

Now we get to the fun part: crazy implications of this hypothesis. I warn you that you might find some of these implications silly, disturbing or outright ridiculous. Nevertheless, I have no prejudice and I will present them as they came in my mind, in no particular order, just to have a bit of fun. Here they are:

• Only entities exhibiting Chorus Behavior (CB) are conscious, the rest are philosophical zombies.
• CB is the ontological software
• A Turing Machine cannot exhibit CB regardless of its complexity therefore it can't be conscious.
• Brain Waves are different because they are a unified, continuous shape (although problems might arise due to them being quantized as photons)
• Consciousness is emergent from a material substrate, but it's fundamentally built into the Universe as a possible outcome of a system able to elicit CB. It is fundamental as ontological software.
• The chorus of your brain waves is what you are. It's irrelevant how that arises. The total sum of its properties is your ontological fingerprint, including what's it like to be you, your consciousness, your qualia and your personal identity. Reproducing that on another hardware platform would mean to create a second instance of yourself, but connected to a different set of sensors (eyes, nose, skin, tongue, ears, sensory nerves etc). Problems arise dealing with the problem of memory/memories but remember, you are just a story told by a neural network able to probe the ontological software in order to avoid being a philosophical zombie.
• The Chorus argument could be used in abortions to make an argument that the fetus is not conscious (assuming you're buying the argument) and hence no suffering will occur because at that point it's a philosophical zombie.
• Anesthesia, sleep and pathology affecting brain wave behavior is relevant for the study of consciousness
• The reason why consciousness and qualia is possible only for your nervous system is because it's the only system capable of CB. Other organs don't exhibit it (to my knowledge), but if they did, then we would need to take into consideration the possibility of qualia happening in them as well.
• Since the Chorus shape is given by a finite amount of hardware, and since the shape itself that is your personal identity fingerprint is reproducible in principle, then it should in principle be possible for you to be resurrected from death - all is needed is for your pattern to be recreated. Or it could naturally arise, just by chance, in another neural network with the same properties as your previous one.
• There must be something special about your wave since it can be altered (say, one of your neurons dies) and yet your personal identity feels the same, the chorus is more or less the same. Of course, more and more neurons disappearing from their chorus contribution would change the wave dramatically and then your personal identity might fade away (or transform itself in an unrecognizable form), as we seen in serious pathology.
• Since qualia is a manifestation of the neural hardware probing the ontological software, it might be that there are unknown qualia available in the software itself, that might not be accessible to our brain because it's limited by its 86 billion neuron hardware. A bigger brain might have access to qualia impossible for our brain as it is right now.
• Computers or non living objects can be conscious if they are built (intentionally or by accident) in such a way to exhibit CB.
• Why CB? Because it's the software of consciousness, the software of existence.
• Death is not final as your CB can in principle be recreated, either intentionally or by accident (another similar hardware, a Boltzmann brain)
• Consciousness is a property of the electromagnetic field, because that's where the brain waves take place
• You are identical to your CB, based on the physical substrate. There's no fundamental dualism, but instead we have a pseudo-dualism where you have a physical hardware and a CB software.
• If CB is the ontological software, then consciousness can arise in unlikely places, regardless of how ridiculous this might sound. What kind of unlikely places? In the center of stars, where you have enough electromagnetic complexity to give rise to CB. Of course,  nobody will ever know that consciousness is there because there's no way for it to communicate (or is it? maybe we should look more carefully)
• Based on CB and the conditions at the Big Bang, when everything was close together and low entropy, you can say that at that particular time there could have been a universe-wide consciousness (call it God, if you want), since a universe-wide chorus behavior was possible at that time. As time went by, only limited, reduced pockets of consciousness were possible, like human brains.
• If the previous assertion is true, we are all "God", in the sense that we're using the same software as that original consciousness, albeit in a limited form. Going further, you can say that we are indeed made after God's appearance, in the sense of having the same ontology as the original cosmic consciousness (as ridiculous as that might sound).
• Wanna clone someone? Clone his or her CB. It might not be possible due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
• True free will might be possible. If consciousness really is a wave in the abstract space of ontological software, there might be laws governing it that allow causality to happen in that abstract realm (say, in the realm of logic) that then can be physically realized by allowing it (the software) to collapse the wave function in such a way that physical causality holds (basically, choosing a particular outcome that is compatible with classical outcomes). If you want a simpler description than that, it would be like a soul making a choice and materializing the physical world to correspond to that choice. This would be why ontologically the material world is quantum - to allow pure free will based not on deterministic materialism but on abstract consciousness-based causality. As much as that sounds like total gibberish and Deepak Chopra-ism, the proposition is simple: the hardware (neural substrate) will cause the Chorus behavior to arise, which then can control the hardware by collapsing the wave function (assuming it has access to that at the software level). This allows for true free will (in the sense that it's not materialistically pre-determined, but instead can function at a level of abstraction in the actual ontological software).

There you have it - this is how I currently view the hard problem of consciousness. Granted, you might find a lot of stuff not to like in the text. A lot of stuff is speculative, and there's a lot to learn about brain waves before having the audacity to make such substantive claims. There's a lot of potential criticism on particular points to be made as well. Nevertheless, this is my current point of view, subject to revision based on criticism/missed points/possible outright errors.

This will be updated in the future as I accumulate new insight. Again, it's not meant as a scientific "paper" but more like a friendly talk about how could the hard problem be solved and what would a pertinent mechanism look like.