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> What's an illusion? One problem I have with illusionism is that if consciousness is an illusion, what is it that is being fooled by the illusion? Presumably

• narag 9y ago
  The root of that evil seems to be determinism or IOW dualism.
  • KennyCason 9y ago
    Are determinism and dualism considered to be one-in-the-same? I tend to think of dualism as being a sort of fundamental duality for example "nothing - something" or they way I prefer to word them, "something - not something". However, determinism tends force a cause-effect, or hierarchical, or directional meaning. For example, determinism in relation to my above nothing/something duality would be "from nothing came something" or something of that flavor. However, would could also say that there was no deterministic relationship and that both nothing and something mutually depend on each other to exist. i.e. there is not directional arrow of relationship. (I'm not a professional philosopher)
    • danbruc 9y ago
      Are determinism and dualism considered to be one-in-the-same? Not at all, they are more like opposites of each other. Dualism in this context refers to the idea that there is something non-physical in addition to the physical body and brain that makes you conscious, a soul or something along that line. If you think that dualism is wrong and you are just a bunch of atoms governed by the laws of physics, then you probably think determinism is true, i.e. the choices people make are not really free choices but just the results of the initial conditions and the laws of physics (which may actually be non-deterministic, for example if the randomness of quantum physics is real, which makes the naming potentially a bit confusing).
      • state_less 9y ago
        Yep, even if the process is stochastic, and the result is determined by some mixture of present state and randomness. It's still determined. If we replayed everything with the same random variables, we'd get the same result. It's hard to walk away from this determinism since we apply it to the rest of the world so often. It seems really suspicious to not also apply it to ourselves.
      • KennyCason 9y ago
        Got it. I didn’t think they were, or that you necessarily implied. I think I got mixed up with the last bit of wording in the commenters sentence and his intent. I’m also realizing based on a couple of responses that my thoughts on dualism probably fall out of what the majority of people consider dualism to mean. I.e. not just limited to the mind body problem. Thanks for the clarification :)
      • visarga 9y ago
        > you think that dualism is wrong and you are just a bunch of atoms That's what I am - a self replicating, self adapting bunch of atoms that manages to keep being alive for a few decades. Not just any bunch of atoms. Any self replicating system has interesting properties not found in non-replicators.
    • narag 9y ago
      Are determinism and dualism considered to be one-in-the-same? Dualism AFAIK is believing that body and soul are two different entities. Atheism negates the soul so only the body exists, with the mind as a structure of brain activity. Since the body is matter and subject to physics laws, some conclude that there can't be free will. But this is actually assuming a dualist vision, as if we existed outside the physical world.
      • EamonnMR 9y ago
        I have yet to hear a definition of free will that makes any sense.
        • KennyCason 9y ago
          Agreed. I actually wrote a short paper walking through determinism and non-determinism to ultimately demonstrate that we can’t describe a system in which we have control as any system with rules governing it directly violate the possibility of control. My conclusion was not that free will is impossible, but that it at very least can not be defined. I may upload it if I get some more peer review first.
        • vinceguidry 9y ago
          Try this one. Consciousness as an emergent phenomenon. All the rules and laws by which the brain operates are completely constrained by physical laws, but they create an emergent 'field' in which it is not mathematically possible to predict the behavior of the field. In other words, causation easily flows into the brain, but not outward from it. Here's a link if you're curious: http://www.informationphilosopher.com/knowledge/emergent_determinism.html http://www.informationphilosopher.com/knowledge/emergent_det... The brain has its own set of rules that it uses that is only partially attributable to the rest of the world around it. It can create it's own rules and operate 'under it's own steam', in the same way that North Korea manages to operate largely autonomously of the world around it. It's certainly constrained by geopolitics, but its internal behavior manages to remain free regardless. I used to want to reach for quantum mechanics to explain the brain, now I'm happy with "plain old" electromagnetism.
      • 9y ago
    • xaedes 9y ago
      Because you (as me) interprete dualism a little broader: I like following dualities: Unity <-> Duality or Unity <-> Seperation or No-THING-ness <-> Things or the whole <-> the parts
      • KennyCason 9y ago
        Right, that's more in line with the way I view duality. Lately I've actually came up with what I feel is an even more general pattern. And because it's 1am, I'll ramble a bit. :) Typically we like to say things like: Something <-> Nothing True <-> False etc I'm thinking a better pattern may be: Something <-> Not Something True <-> Not True Which yields the pattern "A <-> Not A" The next step is that Everything follows such a relationship, such that you could conclude the Absolute duality of "Absolute/All <-> Not Absolute/All" An interpretation of this may be that: The universe must exist absolutely out of logical necessity as absolutely not existing requires the definition of absolute existence. This means past, present, future, all states, all things, all possibilities, exist. There was no beginning and end everything just "is". This leaves many problems and many things to resolve such as, "if the universe just "is", how is it that I feel the sense of happeningness?". But hey, "Happen <-> Not Happen". They both most be reconciled. A metaphor to reconcile this is to take the static state of all knowledge in your brain as the totality of your brain states. Dreaming, or viewing these different brain states in different orders yields visions where things are happening, even though at rest each piece of knowledge/memory are just static pieces of information. There are many other problems to reconcile, but this is my current line of thought. After spending my whole life fighting battles that emerge with hierarchical, cause-effect logic, I had to go off-roading a bit. Of course, now matter how far we take it. You can with a bit of over simplification, sum your brain up to neurons being "connected or not connected" as the base of everything you know. Which means the limit of the description of the logic of the universe is comically limited based on the structure of your brain. I.e. It seems that we can never self-confirm beyond this play on words. I call this the cosmic joke. Good night. Please forgive my poorly formed, probably not scientific, and brief midnight thoughts :)
        • goldenkey 9y ago
          Take a drug that makes you feel like you might never be the same... a fear inducing one like LSD, mushrooms, or heavy cannabis. And imagine that your very reason for being is to uncover such. And if you get terminated somehow, you fail on two fronts. Maybe every moment in time, every brain state, is simple digits in a long string of a real number. Your whole life..was just computing a unique number. Maybe every person or entity who ever is conscious, computes a number too. What about the set of all those numbers?? Is that the universal set..of all knowledge..of all entropy..of all phenomena?? Is that set of the physicality of experience directly isomorphic to some slices of its members..or a subset..an abstract sense of itself?? Cohomology / homotopy links consciousness to a recursive transformation of itself? Maybe the link between physicality and information is consciousness. Only consciousness provides a single player universe -- and thus provides the mechanism for axiom of choice..grabbing the totality of experience as a piece of data. Without internal experience, we must resort to AC and somehow look at a living creatures' external experience in order to derive the real number their life computes...nonsense..it is not sound. So consciousness really does serve as some sort of bridge. The totality of all consciousness provides the same complexity as the totality of the 3rd person objective universe from start to finish. We have two data sets that encode the same thing. Linked by consciousness. What is the rub?
• tpm 9y ago
  Reading your words this article came to my mind, which I think is interesting in itself and may provide a hint of the answer. Chasing the Rainbow: The Non-conscious Nature of Being https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01924/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0192...
  • patcon 9y ago
    > Though it is an end-product created by non-conscious executive systems, the personal narrative serves the powerful evolutionary function of enabling individuals to communicate (externally broadcast) the contents of internal broadcasting. This in turn allows recipients to generate potentially adaptive strategies, such as predicting the behavior of others and underlies the development of social and cultural structures, that promote species survival. Consequently, it is the capacity to communicate to others the contents of the personal narrative that confers an evolutionary advantage—not the experience of consciousness (personal awareness) itself. I think and theorize on consciousness quite often, but this angle was new to me and kinda blew my mind. Thanks for sharing :)
    • visarga 9y ago
      In AI there have been experiments where agents need to communicate and cooperate in order to solve tasks. They developed a kind of "language", as a result. It's just what happens when cooperation has an evolutionary advantage. An agent needs to model its environment in order to plan successful strategies. But when the environment contains other agents, it becomes necessary to model them too - thus, create representations that can predict future actions of those agents. When applied on the agent itself, these models create the "ego", a representation useful in predicting the agent's own future actions. All this is necessary in order to maximise rewards in the game (and by game, I mean life, for humans, and the task at hand for artificial agents).
  • chimprich 9y ago
    Thanks, an interesting perspective, but I am very much unpersuaded by the argument. At one point they say "we favor Huxley's analogy which regarded “consciousness” as being like a steam whistle on a train—accompanying the work of the engine but having no intrinsic influence or control over it". If consciousness has no impact on cognition, how are we even having this discussion? Our experience of consciousness is driving our arguments about how we are perceiving it. There must be some influence at the very least.
• posterboy 9y ago
  > One problem I have with illusionism is that if consciousness is an illusion, what is it that is being fooled by the illusion? If false==true, what is true?
• pc2g4d 9y ago
  Agreed. The "illusion" approach has always seemed somehow self-referential to me. Who/what is being fooled? Does being mistaken about something (which computers/algorithms can obviously be) somehow endow the thing with self-awareness and inner experience? We could trick a machine into believing it is conscious (`var conscious = true;`) but it's doubtful that that would change the mechanical, nonselfaware nature of its existence.
  • bloaf 9y ago
    My understanding goes like this: The brain is a super information processing machine. It executes incredibly and unimaginably complex algorithms without our knowing about it. But one of the things it does is to construct simplified models of itself, and these simplified models are what we are "aware of." More precisely, these simplified models are what consciousness is. The "illusion" is that consciousness is somehow in the driver's seat. It isn't at all. It is just a kind of post-hoc shorthand that the brain uses for itself. It's more like a log file than an executed piece of code. My typing out these words didn't come from my "consciousness," they came from the brain's incredibly complex algorithms. But my consciousness is taking the credit; it gives the abstract, executive summary version of how my goal of expressing some point led to my word selection. All those "inner experiences" along the way are essentially notational.
    • deleted 9y ago
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    • visarga 9y ago
      You are missing an important part of the puzzle. Yes, the brain creates models of the world and body. But it is locked in a loop of "agent <-> environment", more precisely "perception -> decision -> action -> reward learning -> repeat". This is what grounds the model in reality. The model is still imperfect (an illusion) but a useful one, with regard to maximising human rewards while minding the affordances and limitations of the environment. The source of meaning is not the brain itself, but the game. The game between agent and environment, where the agent collects rewards and tries to reduce losses. All meanings stem from the game itself, meaning is not 'secreted' by brains in a jar. The illusion objection is just an observation that any model, no matter how complex it is, is an approximation. The "ego" itself is a model of the agent, an approximation of the agent. But a useful one, a grounded approximation, that tracks reality as it changes. At the very least the model is good enough to make sure genes get into the next generation, otherwise there would be no more model to talk about. That's the source of meaning and consciousness - it's a loop, a bootstrapped meaning based on self replication. I often see debates about consciousness ignoring the environment and the game (or life). That's a sad situation for philosophy, in my opinion. They got scared of behaviorism decades ago, and now ignore reinforcement learning. But RL is our best bet at cracking the mind-body problem.