Blind people can understand the world - the fact that blind people can interact with the world and become intelligent people proves to me that visual consciousness is an aid, but not the foundation of intelligence.

For any scene you can imagine, you can always imagine interacting with it physically - this implies we have a visual consciousness that could be based upon muscle and touch scripts, since they seem to be an implicit ancillary to visual consciousness.

You could reduce the information going into the brain by 99%, to a few kb per second and experience a similar level of consciousness and ability - If you only opened your eyes for a fraction of a second each second, it might not feel pleasant, but apart from maybe sports, you could live a fairly normal life. In fact if all our senses were similarly restricted, reducing the information entering the brain to less than perhaps a 56k modem, I suspect we would still retain virtually all your abilities.

My proposition is that conscious awareness and intelligence are unlikely to be related to the current higher bandwidth of our senses. This implies computers simulating consciousness may not need to be as powerful as we thought, but rather organized differently than we thought.

The primary evidence offered for parts of consciousness as being a 4th dimension phenomenon are:

1) extension by metaphor from the lower dimensions. I.e. how we understand our two dimensional senses as being a subset of a 3d reality. And so by extension, space/time polarization, thoughts, prediction, emotion, empathy etc. could be a subset of a higher 4th dimension reality.

2) the principle of stepping outside of (above) a spatial dimension in order to observe that dimension (to polarize it into an observer and the observed).

However, there is also evidence in the physical world, outside of consciousness, for a 4th spatial dimension of reality. For instance...

1) Maxwell's equations describing electromagnetic wave propagation make the most mathematical sense only when using a model of the universe implying a 4th spatial dimension.

2) The properties of sub atomic particles make most sense from the perspective of 4th (and higher) spatial dimensions. These are not hypothetical dimensions, but real physical ones.

3) There has been some success in unifying relativistic properties of space and time with quantum properties of mass and energy. On the basis of a 4th spatial dimension as a reference.

4) There is a fundamental problem associated with morphogenesis of cells in nature. (the growth of an organism from a single cell to a fully functioning creature). I have not been able to find any credible explanation from this process from biology texts.

But, if a 4th dimension aspect of reality exists, then the ability may also exist for it to guide 3rd dimensional phenomena. The way 3rd dimensional reality can affect 2nd dimensional phenomena. And the 2nd can affect 1st.

5) I cannot find an explanation, that makes sense to me, of 'simple' physical causality. It seems to be just taken as an axiom. Whereas there is the potential for an explanation through the collapse of a 4th dimension through observation.