I find that many people can learn a lot by doing but then at some point hit a wall and really struggle to recognize that another kind of learning needs to take place to understand a deeper concept.
Your diffuculties arise from the way you talk about the problem.
You ask how you can be sure that a person can change their identity? Your question already presents a mechanism that naturally doesn't work. What is implicit in what you're saying is that changing somehow involves taking something out and putting something completely different in. As in taking out one set of desires and replacing them with some other desires. That is certainly not what happens.
To change some of your desires is to understand them and understand how they arise. That's very related to how you talk to yourself and what expressions you use and where they implicitly lead you. That is the way you speak imposes a certain view of the world, what it consists of and what is possible within it. (That's not to say that you would suddenly be able to fly but there is a whole human domain that you might start discovering from the inside as a human being rather than looking at yourself from the outside as a collection of organs).
Those are mostly either heavily marketed recent books or some very popular books considered "classics" that sort of circulate as representing some field (which they mostly really don't).
If I had made a similar (probably much shorter) list about programming languages it would include Go and Pascal as mind-expanding languages.
That is mostly my point. What conclusion can you actually make about any other society, current or historical, on the basis of "our practical problems being mostly solved by technology"?
I think the danger in this focus on technology now is that it is so easy to dismiss anything at all that ancient Greeks or whomever said as not even simply wrong but even trivial and unworthy of being studied.
Of course I used to dismiss most earlier writings as well. What could they possibly teach me, after all everything is so advanced now? This kind of attitude being widespread and I think entailed in most modern science talk (as an unspoken and easy conclusion that mostly never becomes explicit) is part of the reason we struggle with the same issues as you say.
That is unfortunately the case with me and it took me several years to start realizing that prolonged stress can result in this cascading effect where muscles tightening can distort your body slightly. This in turn can put strain on muscles initially unaffected which can themselves become locked because you cannot release the initial strain. By the time I started realizing it I couldn't answer anymore the question what it feels like for my body to be relaxed.
I think interpreting the intention of the author and the students should take into account that the author's research is in human-computer interaction and that the students most likely are aware of that fact as well.
What it 'really is' is mostly a construction, an amalgam of perceptions that are usually descriptions of observers of what other people seem to do when they find things out or how they've got to discovering something. What you call trait curiosity is, it seems to me, a consequence of the fact that curiosity is of course sexy and highly desirable. If you read popular science books that's what they tell you, there are some people that are curious and just wanting to know stuff and just like that they get Nobel prizes.
I think trait curiosity works similarly with other traits that people can fall into the trap of ascribing to themselves. For example, telling others that you are hard working, never giving up, always being there for people or whatever. Once you start repeating to yourself and to others such statements you can in a sense 'lock yourself' into it. You get into situation where you start thinking 'well, a curious person in this situation should do this, I better do it or else I'm not curious'. I think this is the difference in outcome in trivial pursuits as you say.
On the other hand it's very difficult to be curious about something you really know nothing or very little about. It really makes little sense to be curious about cryptography or quantum computing if you struggled with high school algebra and never made any serious effort to improve your skills and understanding.
Of course none of this is to claim that there is no such thing as pursuing knowledge or ideas without seemingly any external motivation. The way it looks from the inside I think is usually you have to have some idea of what you're doing and you want to see if you can apply this to something else. Counterintuitively, here you're trying to see if something that should be considered different is in fact some slight modification of what you already know. So it's usually not "let's learn something completely new because I like to learn things and am curious" but "let's see if I can reformulate this thing that looks unknown to something that I know". This is the creative part where you are actually learning. The process of reformulating or restating something with a language that you understand and you've built for yourself, bringing in the new idea, often not explicitly stated to be connected with what you know, is what gives you the kick.
What I'm arguing about is that there is a big assumption made prior to any judgement about models of any kind.
At any given point all you have is your singular experiential point of view -- you're reading this comment, coding, chewing your food, remembering a childhood memory, having sex or whatever. That any of this has any correspondence to anything beyond the fact that you are experiencing it at that moment is an assumption. Only then you might start reasoning about the contents. And the contents are of course subject to any brain-in-a-vat objections you might make.
Obviously you cannot live at all if you start questioning your experience at that level. But the point I'm trying to make is that that singular point of view, whatever you are experiencing, is literally all there is. Nothing ever happens, as far as you (or anyone) is concerned, that is different from a personal experience.
To continue to exist at all of course, I don't think there is any other way than what you describe, to start acting based on whatever it is that you are experiencing. But you have to take that initial step and I think being aware of it can lead to a somewhat different understanding of why you feel what you feel and in particular how culture works.
No, 'things outside' are only known to us as mediated through (what we perceive as) the body. The object of which you estimate your degree of belief lies within our experience. There is no sense in which you can say that you know something outside the means of perception. You cannot have degrees of belief about whether you are experiencing something in the first place.
Consciousness is all of your inner experience. It's not about control or perception, that is it's not about what you can control and how you perceive things but that you can control and perceive things.
I don't think there is any reason to doubt that fish and insects for that matter are conscious in that sense.