No need to apologize! Nobody ever quotes anybody in perfect context anyway.
The exact question I had, (and still have) when trying to explain the phenomenon of consciousness from a materialist perspective. In my view, any sophisticated “materialist” is probably an “informationalist” deep down because they recognize that matter is just energy and energy, in its particular arrangements is just a certain pattern amongst many. So matter is fundamentally just information if its anything at all.
So my previous formulation that consciousness is matter’s interactions, is to say consciousness is a change in information, which really is to say consciousness is information because information without change is no new information at all. A more flowery way to put it (if you can imagine that 
) would be to say, consciousness is information as seen from the inside out. It must be (from a materialist perspective) what it is like to be information.
Now, back to your question at hand; if you’ll allow me to restate it:
if the universe is continuous, then all information in the universe is fundamentally one. Why then do I feel like I’m just me, and not the whole universe? Why don’t I know everything? If I, being information, must be everything, why don’t I feel like I am everything?
Well, as I hinted at earlier, I think it’s because there are feedback, recursive, mechanisms in your head that bring representations of information very close together. That is memory, a record of the past, an echo, a change in structure, a pattern that occurred in the past, returns in some similar form to the present. We construct images of ourselves, we also construct images of others, and images of ourselves through other’s eyes, and we imagine how they think we think they must feel, etc, etc, etc.
The information inside the skull is highly relative to the information inside the skull. Much of the information outside it seems not to have such a recurrent pattern. I used the example of the wind earlier as a structure of mutating information that doesn’t have the kind of recursive structures that our neurons form. Whatever it is like to be just the information that is the wind it’s probably not like what it is like to be a human - it doesn’t know that it is the wind, but the structures in our brains do model, recursively, to an alarming degree what it is like to be a human.
Think of it this way: if you’re a model of the universe you’re not the universe. Where there is a simulation of self there is a boundary between self and other, where there is no model of the self, the self is boundless.
I’ve struggled with this a lot. You’re talking about things like sleep right? When the brain enters sleep, it’s behavior changes - the structure of information changes. I don’t know how it changes in such a way that consciousness is lost. But to me, it seems like only a portion of consciousness is lost, or rather it seems to me that consciousness becomes decoherent, or perhaps another way of thinking about it is, it becomes diffuse, rather than - focused.
I don’t think it completely goes away, I think awareness remains while the contents of consciousness fall away. What’s the difference between an experience you forgot and no experience at all? It seems as though, there must be some kind of primary feedback loop of information that is highly active when awake, but less active when unconscious.
Lately, as I’ve pondered upon the experience of sleep, I’ve seen waking awareness as the occurrence of particular models, useful models, models that predict really well. I’ve begun to wonder if sleep is an “informationally theoretic” necessary (not just something we do because it’s efficient to do in a day-night cycle).
I’ve wondered here if competing, opposite and decoherent models, in the brain, that are much less useful for momentary prediction need to be expressed and have their influence made manifest on the typical models and forms we are in waking life, perhaps in order to maintain some kind of homeostatic mechanism. I really don’t know, but I don’t think a change in our awareness of our own awareness is a necessary negation of the model of consciousness as information. I think an aspect of awareness always remains untrammeled.
This is one reason I (in my personal metaphysics, my person explanatory fiction) attempt to disentangle consciousness (the phenomenon of awareness) from its contents. Interestingly enough, this is something you cannot do if you’re a materialist. If you’re an ‘informationalist’ that views information (or matter) as more primary than the subjective experience of being, itself, then you’re stuck in a causal paradigm where the shape of the information is entirely derived from outside influences.
However, we, as HTM enthusiasts (or experts in your case) are, by virtue of the htm paradigm, intuitively aware that every brain is in a constant feedback loop with its environment. So does the man make his environment or does the environment make the man? It’s the chicken or the egg. They seem to go together, don’t they?
The truth may begin to appear to us that causality is always local, that is, it only makes sense when looking at a specific portion of the whole. When looking at the whole, everything causes everything, and when everything’s special, (when everything’s primary), nothing is.
In this way, I think the materialist assumption, that matter is primary to experience is globally inaccurate. And by the same token, the idealist assumption that experience is primary, or fundamentally a causal force to produce what is experienced is also globally untrue. Perhaps either causal direction could be argued for in any specific situation, but we want to talk about what’s fundamental (and we should recognize that what’s typical isn’t even the same thing as what’s fundamental).
So consciousness isn’t derivative of information, but its contents can be nothing other than information. Information isn’t derived from consciousness, but it can exist nowhere else. What’s left? Well, the middle way, I suppose… whatever that is.
Again, the paradox seems ineffable. But by talking through it, as we do, perhaps we can approach the limit.
To bring this entire conversation back to the original post @CreationTribe, Isn’t that what every cortical column is doing in each of our heads all the time - the same thing we’re doing now? Saying to its neighbors, “What is it? What is this thing we’re experiencing, this thing called existence?” Perhaps what we know of as conscious experience is the expression of that information in transit - communication, models changing.