Having read Consciousness begins with feeling, not thinking via Hacker News, I wondered…

1. To have feelings, do you require external input? That is, could a closed system have feelings? If not, then it cannot be conscious, if we follow the post.
2. What is external input? Is it simply a signal you cannot predict? If non-predictability is the key, that suggests the actual signal is the error between prediction and reality, because the only way of knowing that something was unpredictable is to compare the prediction and the stimulus.
3. So one definition of what constitutes a closed system in regards to an isolated unit of consciousness, could be that it somehow relates to its own predictive power of emergent behavior from the parts of itself?
   • The “emergent behavior” needs to be a part of this, since parts generally exhibit variance that doesn’t show on a macro level. Violence in Swiss society doesn’t have a large enough impact on the emergent behavior of society as a whole, so its unpredictability doesn’t matter to the societal organism.