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Yes consciousness is an illusion but the illusion is real. We are pattern recognizing feedback loops (with memory) who simulate a reality not the reality. Thi

Yes consciousness is an illusion but the illusion is real. We are pattern recognizing feedback loops (with memory) who simulate a reality not the reality. This simulation happen to be calibrated in such a way that it allow us to navigate the reality with some success by proxy of our simulation of it.

atomical 10y ago
What is the reality?
- criddell 10y ago
  Mathematics.
  - CuriouslyC 10y ago
    You might make the case for a stochastic simulation, but given how easy it is to produce analytically intractable equations, and the fundamental limits of logical systems demonstrated by Godel's incompleteness theorems, I highly doubt math is anything more than a clever method for approximating the universe.
    - justifier 10y ago
      > stochastic simulation .. approximating the universe your education is showing.. perhaps you have a different definition of mathematics among many definitions you can define mathematics as an abstract science or as what those abstractions are studying but holding the first definition is insufficient evidence for the inexistence of the second i'm unclear what you think intractable equations.. whether easy or difficult to form and what the definitions of easy and hard are or why they are of consequence.. say of mathematics a computer is a system literally built as an electrical manifestation of mathematics, albeit a subset, and in its case suffers limitations of intractability but the mathematics underlying its structure still remain can you defend the position that the limitations of a nand gate somehow disproves quantity(o)? also, I think Godel would be distressed to have heard the incompleteness theorems being used to deny the existence of mathematics incompleteness is intended to show mathematics exists beyond the scope of proof for me incompleteness does go beyond its intentions but as proof of paradox such as the existence mathematics (o) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantity
      - CuriouslyC 10y ago
        If you want to be so general, then anything can be considered mathematics, at which point it kind of loses its meaning. For me, mathematics is any system of symbolic manipulation built on top of axiomatic set theory, ideally having some algebraic structure. Given that the universe is comprised of things and not symbolic representations (unless you want to get really general about what a symbol is) that seems to disqualify it right there. Can we approximately describe the universe using mathematics? At the gross level, with the inclusion of fuzzy sets/probability theory, sure. At the fine level, I'm not so sure we can accurately represent the universe using less information than the universe itself contains - thus you aren't abstracting anything. I mentioned the incompleteness theorems because they suggest a universe that was a consistent logical system would be arbitrarily constrained from valid portions of its state space - a testable hypothesis with no evidence. Of course, if you toss out consistency then all bets are off.
        justifier 10y ago
        > If you want to be so general, then anything can be considered mathematics that was where this whole conversation started, 'what is reality[anything]?' you are working from an incomplete definition of the full scale of, even recognised, mathematics which is clear in that you define it as being 'built on top of axiomatic set theory' when godel used mathematics to show axioms are limited in scope but you, stead Godel, consider that all of mathematics, and now I'm repeating myself
        criddell 10y ago
        > Given that the universe is comprised of things and not symbolic representations In my original comment I was referring to the theory that the universe is entirely mathematics. I'm not talking about modeling with mathematics, rather that the universe is mathematics. There are no things.
  - danbruc 10y ago
    That is at least a contentious point of view. It would probably require some form of Platonism to be true and that seems pretty hard to defend.
    - justifier 10y ago
      this is a 'third realm' strawman, the parent simply said mathematics.. you incited platonism still, i hold it would be more 'hard to defend' abstract concepts fail to exist.. regardless of 'where' beyond the scope of humanity or human curiosity, look at chemistry the universe is rather predicated on relations to the abstract concept of quantity and those distinguishing identities exist within a hadron and in far flung galaxies
      - danbruc 10y ago
        I said Platonism because that is the point of view that mathematical objects are real. As far as I can tell no other point of view asserts the fundamental reality of mathematical objects. And just because I am not absolutely sure I said »a form of Platonism« which I would admittedly better have worded as »something like Platonism«. To you point about quantity. There are grains of sand. Does that mean that there are also numbers? I obviously argue no. You have to take some of the grains and set them aside to count them. You have to split your pile into two and recombine the two piles to add them. You have to line the grains up in order to number them. By itself there are only grains of sand, mathematics only emerges when you impose additional structure on them and perform operations with them. There is no addition in a thousand grains of sand, it is the act of separating and combining them. Or at least imagining to do so. You can build a huge part of mathematics on top of set theory but that does not mean that all of mathematics is already contained in every large enough set of things, at least not in any meaningful way. Only when you decide what to with the things in the set, what kind of manipulations you are willing to consider, that the structures mathematics describes emerge. And while physics looks very mathematically, I see no problem with this. The most simple rules can give rise to staggering complex math. I find it much more reasonable to think - gross oversimplification ahead - that photons travel in straight lines in a three-dimensional space and therefore the electric field follows an inverse-square law instead of assuming that the universe already contained the mathematics needed to deal with electric fields. There are just photons moving around, only after deciding how to measure distances and to look at spherical shells around charges we find a particularly simple way to describe electrical fields. But we could have made a lot of different choices leading to wildly different descriptions.
- danbruc 10y ago
  Not OP, but of course physics. Not that this is necessarily the ultimate answer, there may as well be yet another layer, a layer explaining why physics is the way it is. But strictly speaking that would probably still be physics. This is of course also pretty dangerous, one easily ends up with an infinity of layers, each trying to explain the layer above. It ultimately comes down to questions like why is there anything at all. But those seem way out of reach at the moment and maybe they will remain forever. Being part of what you are trying to study may obstruct your view in an unsurmountable way.
  - exodust 10y ago
    Mr brain literally hurts when I attempt to imagine the final answer behind the universe. I get to a point where my brain quivers and pushes me back like I'm not meant to be lurking there. Off limits, out of bounds. It's so annoying not knowing. Where did all this matter come from, and if it's always been here, then how the hell has it always been here, and why is it like it is. What caused the nature of nature? I bet God doesn't have the answers either. Why would God know the source of God? It wouldn't. This is why I kind of like that recent movie called "Arrival" or the proper name "Story of your life". A new language delivered from Aliens would be great to tackle the big questions.
    - ivm 10y ago
      Form is emptiness and emptiness is form.
  - btmorex 10y ago
    You could just as easily say that consciousness is all that exists and the physical universe is the illusion. There is no objective reality.
    - danbruc 10y ago
      That changes just what reality is, what thing you are trying to understand. It is no longer something outside and independent of your mind but your mind itself and the things within it. Your mind would become the objectively real thing and you could still study the structure of your consciousness, of your experiences, what causes the regularities in them we call the laws of physics and so on. We essentially just decided to ignore most of such possibilities most of the time, from solipsism as you mentioned over Last Thursdayism [1] to living in a simulation or the Matrix. They may seem interesting to ponder about at times but in the end they just prevent you from learning anything at all. You can always come up with a strange scenario in which anything you might believe turns out to be falls. That certainly sounds kind of arbitrary and unscientific, but without some founding assumptions about reality you get nowhere and that is of course not helpful at all. We should certainly keep an eye on those assumption and we do, living in a simulation for example pops up quite frequently, but for the moment our success seems to justify our assumptions. [1] The world came into existence last Thursday in precisely the state of last Thursday with all the memories and evidence of the time before last Thursday just to fool us.
- ThomPete 10y ago
  That depend from which vantage point you are asking that question.
CuriouslyC 10y ago
I agree that our subjective experience is an "illusion" (or more accurately, a construct) rather than an accurate representation of our environment. Furthermore, this is fairly easy to prove. On the other hand, if consciousness is the property of having a subjective experience of existence, it is silly to call consciousness an illusion. An illusion is something that appears to exist, but actually does not. The very fact that we are able to perceive the "illusion" contradicts the implication of the statement.
- ThomPete 10y ago
  No because the point of calling it an illusion is to say that we are more in the passenger seat looking at our lifes as if we were the one driving the car.
  - CuriouslyC 10y ago
    Then it would be more correct to say that free will is an illusion, which is also debatable but at least not absurd.
    - ThomPete 10y ago
      Not at all. Free will is just one of the "victims" another one is our perception of things being what we experience them as (qualia) or that there is only one way to simulate reality. This then comes back to things like AI where you could ask yourself if there are other forms of feedback loops which could be "conscious" in some form or another.
- eeZah7Ux 10y ago
  The illusory aspects are ideas that consciousness is "atomic", constantly present, persistent, flows continuously and we are fully in control of it. Modern neurology proves otherwise.
rocqua 10y ago
Isn't that past the point where something stops being an illusion and starts being real? I find this question, like whether we have 'free will' in a deterministic universe, to be meaningless. You are simply stretching a naive interpretation of the concept until it's breaking point, and then claiming reality doesn't fit with that concept. One should at the very least consider if the original definition used was perhaps too naive.
- ThomPete 10y ago
  Real for who? Free will is obviously an extremely important subject since its the assumption behind most of our moral and legal system. You can of course ignore it and just assume, however I am unconvinced that does anything good to our understanding of other people.
  - rocqua 10y ago
    For the moral and legal system, 'Free will' is important because it means people are responsible for their actions. In that sense, a world where someone could have made a different choice is a world with less free will. After all, the choice they made was random, it wasn't inherent in their character. What matters here is agency. Did you act of your own volition, with your own agency? Or did someone else use their agency to manipulate you (threats, etc.). In this perspective, free will means that your choice depend on who you are (i.e. in the causal chain that lead to your decisions, your 'character' was of very large influence). In a materialist view, your character would be a property of your body. There is a gray area, as alluded to in the aricle, for those properties of your body you are not aware of, that play a large role in the decision process. (e.g. being cranky because of some indigestion)
    - ThomPete 10y ago
      Not sure what you mean with it being random. It's not. The choices they made are based on previous choices they made. In that respect it's more akin to an evolutionary way of looking at our choices. You don't need to be manipulated by anyone else it might just be that you simply don't make the choices you think you do but that they are spread out over a much longer timeline.
amelius 10y ago
> We are pattern recognizing feedback loops (with memory) who simulate a reality not the reality. This could also hold for a philosophical zombie, so this doesn't say anything about consciousness. Or perhaps we're talking about different kinds of consciousness here (unfortunately, good standard terminology seems missing).
- otikik 10y ago
  If I have understood the article correctly, the main idea is that philosophical zombies don't exist. Or rather, that we all are. The "thing" that would separate us from them, subjective consciousness, would be just an illusion - another feature in the zombie/human brain, like memory or perception.
  - amelius 10y ago
    > [...] the main idea is that philosophical zombies don't exist. Or rather, that we all are. Not sure if I can follow. Isn't that a contradiction?
    - otikik 10y ago
      There were two groups ("really conscious" vs philosophical zombies). If you accept what the article talks about, the thing which separates bith groups doesn't exist. So there is only one group. You could say that one doesn't exist (as the zombies, so far at least, are hypothetical, I'm inclined to choose them there), or you could say that they are both the same group. It's a lingüistic choice, not a contradiction.
- ThomPete 10y ago
  yes thats the zombie part (all organisms are this) What makes us different is that we seem to be able to reflect on this loop, not in the driver seat but as a passenger making notes about future drives.

atomical 10y ago

What is the reality?

criddell 10y ago
Mathematics.
- CuriouslyC 10y ago
  You might make the case for a stochastic simulation, but given how easy it is to produce analytically intractable equations, and the fundamental limits of logical systems demonstrated by Godel's incompleteness theorems, I highly doubt math is anything more than a clever method for approximating the universe.
  - justifier 10y ago
    > stochastic simulation .. approximating the universe your education is showing.. perhaps you have a different definition of mathematics among many definitions you can define mathematics as an abstract science or as what those abstractions are studying but holding the first definition is insufficient evidence for the inexistence of the second i'm unclear what you think intractable equations.. whether easy or difficult to form and what the definitions of easy and hard are or why they are of consequence.. say of mathematics a computer is a system literally built as an electrical manifestation of mathematics, albeit a subset, and in its case suffers limitations of intractability but the mathematics underlying its structure still remain can you defend the position that the limitations of a nand gate somehow disproves quantity(o)? also, I think Godel would be distressed to have heard the incompleteness theorems being used to deny the existence of mathematics incompleteness is intended to show mathematics exists beyond the scope of proof for me incompleteness does go beyond its intentions but as proof of paradox such as the existence mathematics (o) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantity
    - CuriouslyC 10y ago
      If you want to be so general, then anything can be considered mathematics, at which point it kind of loses its meaning. For me, mathematics is any system of symbolic manipulation built on top of axiomatic set theory, ideally having some algebraic structure. Given that the universe is comprised of things and not symbolic representations (unless you want to get really general about what a symbol is) that seems to disqualify it right there. Can we approximately describe the universe using mathematics? At the gross level, with the inclusion of fuzzy sets/probability theory, sure. At the fine level, I'm not so sure we can accurately represent the universe using less information than the universe itself contains - thus you aren't abstracting anything. I mentioned the incompleteness theorems because they suggest a universe that was a consistent logical system would be arbitrarily constrained from valid portions of its state space - a testable hypothesis with no evidence. Of course, if you toss out consistency then all bets are off.
      - justifier 10y ago
        > If you want to be so general, then anything can be considered mathematics that was where this whole conversation started, 'what is reality[anything]?' you are working from an incomplete definition of the full scale of, even recognised, mathematics which is clear in that you define it as being 'built on top of axiomatic set theory' when godel used mathematics to show axioms are limited in scope but you, stead Godel, consider that all of mathematics, and now I'm repeating myself
      - criddell 10y ago
        > Given that the universe is comprised of things and not symbolic representations In my original comment I was referring to the theory that the universe is entirely mathematics. I'm not talking about modeling with mathematics, rather that the universe is mathematics. There are no things.
- danbruc 10y ago
  That is at least a contentious point of view. It would probably require some form of Platonism to be true and that seems pretty hard to defend.
  - justifier 10y ago
    this is a 'third realm' strawman, the parent simply said mathematics.. you incited platonism still, i hold it would be more 'hard to defend' abstract concepts fail to exist.. regardless of 'where' beyond the scope of humanity or human curiosity, look at chemistry the universe is rather predicated on relations to the abstract concept of quantity and those distinguishing identities exist within a hadron and in far flung galaxies
    - danbruc 10y ago
      I said Platonism because that is the point of view that mathematical objects are real. As far as I can tell no other point of view asserts the fundamental reality of mathematical objects. And just because I am not absolutely sure I said »a form of Platonism« which I would admittedly better have worded as »something like Platonism«. To you point about quantity. There are grains of sand. Does that mean that there are also numbers? I obviously argue no. You have to take some of the grains and set them aside to count them. You have to split your pile into two and recombine the two piles to add them. You have to line the grains up in order to number them. By itself there are only grains of sand, mathematics only emerges when you impose additional structure on them and perform operations with them. There is no addition in a thousand grains of sand, it is the act of separating and combining them. Or at least imagining to do so. You can build a huge part of mathematics on top of set theory but that does not mean that all of mathematics is already contained in every large enough set of things, at least not in any meaningful way. Only when you decide what to with the things in the set, what kind of manipulations you are willing to consider, that the structures mathematics describes emerge. And while physics looks very mathematically, I see no problem with this. The most simple rules can give rise to staggering complex math. I find it much more reasonable to think - gross oversimplification ahead - that photons travel in straight lines in a three-dimensional space and therefore the electric field follows an inverse-square law instead of assuming that the universe already contained the mathematics needed to deal with electric fields. There are just photons moving around, only after deciding how to measure distances and to look at spherical shells around charges we find a particularly simple way to describe electrical fields. But we could have made a lot of different choices leading to wildly different descriptions.
danbruc 10y ago
Not OP, but of course physics. Not that this is necessarily the ultimate answer, there may as well be yet another layer, a layer explaining why physics is the way it is. But strictly speaking that would probably still be physics. This is of course also pretty dangerous, one easily ends up with an infinity of layers, each trying to explain the layer above. It ultimately comes down to questions like why is there anything at all. But those seem way out of reach at the moment and maybe they will remain forever. Being part of what you are trying to study may obstruct your view in an unsurmountable way.
- exodust 10y ago
  Mr brain literally hurts when I attempt to imagine the final answer behind the universe. I get to a point where my brain quivers and pushes me back like I'm not meant to be lurking there. Off limits, out of bounds. It's so annoying not knowing. Where did all this matter come from, and if it's always been here, then how the hell has it always been here, and why is it like it is. What caused the nature of nature? I bet God doesn't have the answers either. Why would God know the source of God? It wouldn't. This is why I kind of like that recent movie called "Arrival" or the proper name "Story of your life". A new language delivered from Aliens would be great to tackle the big questions.
  - ivm 10y ago
    Form is emptiness and emptiness is form.
- btmorex 10y ago
  You could just as easily say that consciousness is all that exists and the physical universe is the illusion. There is no objective reality.
  - danbruc 10y ago
    That changes just what reality is, what thing you are trying to understand. It is no longer something outside and independent of your mind but your mind itself and the things within it. Your mind would become the objectively real thing and you could still study the structure of your consciousness, of your experiences, what causes the regularities in them we call the laws of physics and so on. We essentially just decided to ignore most of such possibilities most of the time, from solipsism as you mentioned over Last Thursdayism [1] to living in a simulation or the Matrix. They may seem interesting to ponder about at times but in the end they just prevent you from learning anything at all. You can always come up with a strange scenario in which anything you might believe turns out to be falls. That certainly sounds kind of arbitrary and unscientific, but without some founding assumptions about reality you get nowhere and that is of course not helpful at all. We should certainly keep an eye on those assumption and we do, living in a simulation for example pops up quite frequently, but for the moment our success seems to justify our assumptions. [1] The world came into existence last Thursday in precisely the state of last Thursday with all the memories and evidence of the time before last Thursday just to fool us.
ThomPete 10y ago
That depend from which vantage point you are asking that question.

CuriouslyC 10y ago

I agree that our subjective experience is an "illusion" (or more accurately, a construct) rather than an accurate representation of our environment. Furthermore, this is fairly easy to prove. On the other hand, if consciousness is the property of having a subjective experience of existence, it is silly to call consciousness an illusion. An illusion is something that appears to exist, but actually does not. The very fact that we are able to perceive the "illusion" contradicts the implication of the statement.

ThomPete 10y ago
No because the point of calling it an illusion is to say that we are more in the passenger seat looking at our lifes as if we were the one driving the car.
- CuriouslyC 10y ago
  Then it would be more correct to say that free will is an illusion, which is also debatable but at least not absurd.
  - ThomPete 10y ago
    Not at all. Free will is just one of the "victims" another one is our perception of things being what we experience them as (qualia) or that there is only one way to simulate reality. This then comes back to things like AI where you could ask yourself if there are other forms of feedback loops which could be "conscious" in some form or another.
eeZah7Ux 10y ago
The illusory aspects are ideas that consciousness is "atomic", constantly present, persistent, flows continuously and we are fully in control of it. Modern neurology proves otherwise.

rocqua 10y ago

Isn't that past the point where something stops being an illusion and starts being real? I find this question, like whether we have 'free will' in a deterministic universe, to be meaningless. You are simply stretching a naive interpretation of the concept until it's breaking point, and then claiming reality doesn't fit with that concept. One should at the very least consider if the original definition used was perhaps too naive.

ThomPete 10y ago
Real for who? Free will is obviously an extremely important subject since its the assumption behind most of our moral and legal system. You can of course ignore it and just assume, however I am unconvinced that does anything good to our understanding of other people.
- rocqua 10y ago
  For the moral and legal system, 'Free will' is important because it means people are responsible for their actions. In that sense, a world where someone could have made a different choice is a world with less free will. After all, the choice they made was random, it wasn't inherent in their character. What matters here is agency. Did you act of your own volition, with your own agency? Or did someone else use their agency to manipulate you (threats, etc.). In this perspective, free will means that your choice depend on who you are (i.e. in the causal chain that lead to your decisions, your 'character' was of very large influence). In a materialist view, your character would be a property of your body. There is a gray area, as alluded to in the aricle, for those properties of your body you are not aware of, that play a large role in the decision process. (e.g. being cranky because of some indigestion)
  - ThomPete 10y ago
    Not sure what you mean with it being random. It's not. The choices they made are based on previous choices they made. In that respect it's more akin to an evolutionary way of looking at our choices. You don't need to be manipulated by anyone else it might just be that you simply don't make the choices you think you do but that they are spread out over a much longer timeline.

amelius 10y ago

> We are pattern recognizing feedback loops (with memory) who simulate a reality not the reality. This could also hold for a philosophical zombie, so this doesn't say anything about consciousness. Or perhaps we're talking about different kinds of consciousness here (unfortunately, good standard terminology seems missing).

otikik 10y ago
If I have understood the article correctly, the main idea is that philosophical zombies don't exist. Or rather, that we all are. The "thing" that would separate us from them, subjective consciousness, would be just an illusion - another feature in the zombie/human brain, like memory or perception.
- amelius 10y ago
  > [...] the main idea is that philosophical zombies don't exist. Or rather, that we all are. Not sure if I can follow. Isn't that a contradiction?
  - otikik 10y ago
    There were two groups ("really conscious" vs philosophical zombies). If you accept what the article talks about, the thing which separates bith groups doesn't exist. So there is only one group. You could say that one doesn't exist (as the zombies, so far at least, are hypothetical, I'm inclined to choose them there), or you could say that they are both the same group. It's a lingüistic choice, not a contradiction.
ThomPete 10y ago
yes thats the zombie part (all organisms are this) What makes us different is that we seem to be able to reflect on this loop, not in the driver seat but as a passenger making notes about future drives.