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> And yet we're conscious of something. Prove it. Susan Greenfield has a wonderfully challenging proposal for an implementation of consciousness. Paraphrasing

> And yet we're conscious of something. Prove it. Susan Greenfield has a wonderfully challenging proposal for an implementation of consciousness. Paraphrasing from memory: The entire functionality of consciousness is that, when the brain asks itself "Am I conscious?" the answer comes back "Yes". And it does nothing else. She wrote a short book called 'Consciousness' about it, which I enjoyed. Such a refreshingly naughty idea.

talles 11y ago
I didn't read the book but, from my point of view, it doesn't matter what the question or the answer is, "asking itself" is consciousness. Trying to prove that there are other consciousness other than yours is an utterly hard problem. Trying to prove to yourself that you are conscious is non-sense. If you are trying to prove something "to yourself" you already assumed that there's an "yourself". Welcome to the rabbit hole.
smithkl42 11y ago
I'm familiar with approaches like that, but they've always struck me as supremely silly. Answers like that miss entirely the problem, the uniqueness and the mystery of consciousness. (But then I'm one of those despised classical theists who think that consciousness is best explained by postulating a divine origin for the world - an answer desperately out of fashion these days.)
- robotresearcher 11y ago
  On the contrary, Greenfield's proposal directly and explicitly addresses "the problem, the uniqueness and the mystery of consciousness" and proposes a simple solution which explains them. Just because you think she's wrong doesn't mean you can dismiss the argument as missing the point. She knows the area very well. I don't attempt to present her argument, just the proposal. The book is interesting.
kenbellows 11y ago
I also haven't read the book, but at first glance, I strongly dispute the statement that consciousness "does nothing else". The "part" of consciousness, so to speak, that most troubles modern philosophers and neurologists and the like is the subjective experience that each of us has. My favorite example of how we know we experience subjectivity is the classic "inverted spectrum" puzzle: What if what I see when I look at a red apple is the same as what you see when you look at a green apple? What if the way I experience blue and yellow is opposite from the way you do, so that if my mind was somehow "swapped" with yours the sky and the ocean would appear yellow and canaries and cheddar cheese would look blue? Is there any way to know? Regardless of your answers to the above questions, the very fact that we can ask that question intelligibly demonstrates that we intuitively understand that I experience the world subjectively and so do you. A common conclusion of the puzzle is the idea that we can't ever know what another person's experience of color is because of course we aren't them; put another way, our experiences are inherently subjective. It's true that the light waves that our brains interpret as color objectively behave a certain way, but the actual colors that we see are the conscious experience of our brain's interpretation of the light waves.
- robotresearcher 11y ago
  "Am I having subjective experiences right now?" "Yes." "What are the nature of those subjective experiences?" (crickets) It works pretty well. And it's hard to refute without appealing to 'I just know'.
  - EGreg 11y ago
    That is because they are unlike any objective observations. So we don't have the language to describe them.
EGreg 11y ago
I like Susan Greenfield. I have been trying to follow Chalmers, Greenfield, Ramachandran, Searle and others who purport to talk about consciousness in various ways and from various perspectives. The thing is, we can see that our INTERNAL SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE is unlike any other thing we encounter in the world. It is unlike any process that we build or discover. For example, why am I in my body and not yours? As a software architect, I can recognize when there are arbitary constants being placed in the code. Likewise here, the distribution of "souls" to "bodies"... the phenomenon of internal experience corresponds exactly to my body, and not to someone else's. And since it is internal, I need to describe it from my point of view as "I", and not as something that is generated externally. It is the only thing I cannot view externally. So it is different from everything else.
- robotresearcher 11y ago
  > why am I in my body and not yours? The simplest explanation that doesn't appeal to magic is that the 'I' is created by the activity of the CNS (etc) of a body. That seems completely satisfactory to me. It's like asking why the engine sounds of my car are in my car and not in your car. A related answer is "because that's where your eyeballs are". If you wear a good VR headset, you can be somewhere other than your body for a while.

talles 11y ago

I didn't read the book but, from my point of view, it doesn't matter what the question or the answer is, "asking itself" is consciousness. Trying to prove that there are other consciousness other than yours is an utterly hard problem. Trying to prove to yourself that you are conscious is non-sense. If you are trying to prove something "to yourself" you already assumed that there's an "yourself". Welcome to the rabbit hole.

smithkl42 11y ago

I'm familiar with approaches like that, but they've always struck me as supremely silly. Answers like that miss entirely the problem, the uniqueness and the mystery of consciousness. (But then I'm one of those despised classical theists who think that consciousness is best explained by postulating a divine origin for the world - an answer desperately out of fashion these days.)

robotresearcher 11y ago
On the contrary, Greenfield's proposal directly and explicitly addresses "the problem, the uniqueness and the mystery of consciousness" and proposes a simple solution which explains them. Just because you think she's wrong doesn't mean you can dismiss the argument as missing the point. She knows the area very well. I don't attempt to present her argument, just the proposal. The book is interesting.

kenbellows 11y ago

I also haven't read the book, but at first glance, I strongly dispute the statement that consciousness "does nothing else". The "part" of consciousness, so to speak, that most troubles modern philosophers and neurologists and the like is the subjective experience that each of us has. My favorite example of how we know we experience subjectivity is the classic "inverted spectrum" puzzle: What if what I see when I look at a red apple is the same as what you see when you look at a green apple? What if the way I experience blue and yellow is opposite from the way you do, so that if my mind was somehow "swapped" with yours the sky and the ocean would appear yellow and canaries and cheddar cheese would look blue? Is there any way to know? Regardless of your answers to the above questions, the very fact that we can ask that question intelligibly demonstrates that we intuitively understand that I experience the world subjectively and so do you. A common conclusion of the puzzle is the idea that we can't ever know what another person's experience of color is because of course we aren't them; put another way, our experiences are inherently subjective. It's true that the light waves that our brains interpret as color objectively behave a certain way, but the actual colors that we see are the conscious experience of our brain's interpretation of the light waves.

robotresearcher 11y ago
"Am I having subjective experiences right now?" "Yes." "What are the nature of those subjective experiences?" (crickets) It works pretty well. And it's hard to refute without appealing to 'I just know'.
- EGreg 11y ago
  That is because they are unlike any objective observations. So we don't have the language to describe them.

EGreg 11y ago

I like Susan Greenfield. I have been trying to follow Chalmers, Greenfield, Ramachandran, Searle and others who purport to talk about consciousness in various ways and from various perspectives. The thing is, we can see that our INTERNAL SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE is unlike any other thing we encounter in the world. It is unlike any process that we build or discover. For example, why am I in my body and not yours? As a software architect, I can recognize when there are arbitary constants being placed in the code. Likewise here, the distribution of "souls" to "bodies"... the phenomenon of internal experience corresponds exactly to my body, and not to someone else's. And since it is internal, I need to describe it from my point of view as "I", and not as something that is generated externally. It is the only thing I cannot view externally. So it is different from everything else.

robotresearcher 11y ago
> why am I in my body and not yours? The simplest explanation that doesn't appeal to magic is that the 'I' is created by the activity of the CNS (etc) of a body. That seems completely satisfactory to me. It's like asking why the engine sounds of my car are in my car and not in your car. A related answer is "because that's where your eyeballs are". If you wear a good VR headset, you can be somewhere other than your body for a while.