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Consciousness does exist in some form though. The "experience" of sensations that we're both having right now is what many would label being conscious surely? I
by tidenly 6y ago
Consciousness does exist in some form though. The "experience" of sensations that we're both having right now is what many would label being conscious surely? I too don't think it's anything necessarily magical or separate from physicality about it, but it certainly exists.
- acidbaseextract 6y agoA typical way to articulate it is that the experience of consciousness is just another sense-perception, not the "center of you". In the same way that your sense for certain types of light is called sight, your sense for certain types of neural activity is consciousness.
- ehnto 6y agoBut does it have to be anything else? That insight doesn't actually change the discussion or what we are trying to describe I don't think.
- imtringued 6y agoWe have consciousness because our brain tells us we do. Establishing anything beyond this is futile. Consciousness sounds like an extremely beneficial evolutionary trait to me. Imagine an "unconscious human" who shares the same body as us but the brain thinks it can't think, thinks it is dead, thinks that nothing it senses is alive or real including itself and its own thoughts. That unconscious human can definitively exist as an organism but it would have a hard time to coexist in a community of humans. Please don't nitpick the usage of the word "think" because I'm referring to "machine style" thinking. A computer can think without being conscious.
- aeturnum 6y agoThis definition is fine as long as you extend it to all living things. In some sense all plants and animals (and bacteria and fungus) are experiencing sensations. Of course, doing that removes any sense that humans are special or unique, which was darawk's point.
- goatlover 6y agoThe hard problem of consciousness isn't about humans being special. It's just a starting point because we know ourselves to be conscious. The hard problem is explaining our subjective experiences in physical terms. And it's the same problem for anything that has subjective experiences. Thus Nagel bringing up bat sonar experiences and Block using Commander Data.
- stewbrew 6y agoThe even harder problem is to understand that those physical terms are a temporary consens among conscious beings-not some absolute truth. You cannot think physics as if you were not a human.
- GeneralMayhem 6y agoWe do not know that all plants and animals experience sensations subjectively. We know that they respond to stimuli; we do not know that they experience qualia. This path can lead to solipsism, but there are many exit points between "I am the only conscious being" and "all living things are conscious."
- lmm 6y agoWe don't know that anything experiences qualia, ourselves included, because the concept hasn't been rigorously defined - perhaps because it's not actually a valid concept at all.
- GeneralMayhem 6y agoI think you're going to find it a very hard sell to convince me that I don't experience qualia. I don't know what it's like to feel pain? I don't experience sight, or sound, or abstract thoughts and beliefs, as subjective experiences? The problem with qualia, subjective consciousness, and all their near-synonyms is that they're almost impossible to define non-self-referentially. That doesn't mean they don't exist, though - and all human experience is indication that they do.