There's a lot of research that suggests this is happening at least some of the time.
>which is very much unlike how most people would describe their experience of it
How people feel consciousness works has no real bearing on how it actually works
I'm less in the "it's only X or Y" and more in the "wait, I was only ever X or Y all along" camp.
Sure, it's not completely in control but if it's just a rationalization then it begs the question: why bother? Is it accidental? If it's just an accident, then what replaces it in the planning process and why isn't that thing consciousness?
- Air: Thoughts
- Water: Emotions
- Fire: Willpower
- Earth: Physical Sensations
- Void: Awareness of the above plus the ability to shift focus to whichever one is most relevant to the context at hand.
Void is actually the most important one in characterising what a human would deem as being fully conscious, as all four of these elements are constantly affecting each other and shifting in priority. For example, let's take a soldier, who has arguably the most ethically challenging job on the planet: determining who to kill.
The soldier, when on the approach to his target zone, has to ignore negative thoughts, emotions and physical sensations telling him to stop: the cold, the wind, the rain, the bodily exhaustion as they swim and hike the terrain.
Once at the target zone he then has to shift to pay attention to what he was ignoring. He cannot ignore his fear - it may rightly be warning him of an incoming threat. But he cannot give into it either - otherwise he may well kill an innocent. He has to pay attention to his rational thoughts and process them in order to make an assessment of the threat and act accordingly. His focus has now shifted away from willpower and more towards his physical sensations (eyesight, sounds, smells) and his thoughts. He can then make the assessment on whether to pull the trigger, which could be some truly horrific scenario, like whether or not to pull his trigger on a child in front of him because the child is holding an object which could be a gun.
When it comes to AI, I think it is arguable they have a thought process. They may also have access to physical sensation data e.g the heat of their processors, but unless that is coded in to their program, that physical sensation data does not influence their thoughts, although extreme processor heat may slow down their calculations and ultimately lead to them stop functioning altogether. But they do not have the "void" element, allowing them to be aware of this.
They do not yet have independent willpower. As far as I know, no-one is programming them where they have free agency to select goals and pursue them. But this theoretically seems possible, and I often wonder what would happen if you created a bunch of AIs each with the starting goal of "stay alive" and "talk to another AI and find out about <topic>", with the proviso that they must create another goal once they have failed or achieved that previous goal, and you then set them off talking to each other. In this case "stay alive" or "avoid damage" could be interpreted entirely virtually, with points awarded for successes or failures or physically if they were acting through robots and had sensors to evaluate damage taken. Again, they also need "void" to be able to evaluate their efforts in context with everything else.
They also do not have emotions, although I often wonder if this would be possible to simulate by creating a selection of variables with percentage values, with different percentage values influencing their decision making choices. I imagine this may be similar to how weights play into the current programming but I don't know enough about how they work to say that with any confidence. Again, they would not have "void" unless they had some kind of meta level of awareness programming where they could learn to overcome the programmed "fear" weighting and act differently through experience in certain contexts.
It is very scary from a human perspective to contemplate all of this, because someone with great power who can act on thought and willpower alone and ignore physical sensation and emotion and with no awareness or concern for the wider context is very close to what we would identify as a psychopath. We would consider a psychopath to have some level of consciousness, but we also can recognise as humans that there is something missing, or a "screw loose". This dividing line is even more dramatically apparent in sociopaths, because they can mask their behaviours and appear normal, but then when they make a mistake and the mask drops it can be terrifying when you realise what you're actually dealing with. I suspect this last part is another element of "void", which would be close to what the Buddhist's describe as Indra's Web or Net, which is that as well as being aware of our actions in relation to ourselves, we're also conscious of how they affect others.
