4 ms·

You've made a huge leap from there-is-no-hard-problem-of-consciousness to there-is-no-consciousness. Consciousness is the experience of being something. I know

You've made a huge leap from there-is-no-hard-problem-of-consciousness to there-is-no-consciousness. Consciousness is the experience of being something. I know it exists, because I'm experiencing it right now. The experience is consciousness, despite being illusory in many ways. Even a completely illusory experience is a conscious experience. In no way does it preclude my just being stuff, or other forms of stuff experiencing things too (and thus also being conscious). The mystery is how I can feel anything at all despite being just stuff.

lambdatronics 6y ago
The problem with these debates is that they turn into a referendum on how people feel about mysticism. Some want to think that a mysterious phenomenon like consciousness requires a solution that takes us beyond science into the mystical. Others can't stand mysticism, especially not in a field of scientific inquiry. If neuroscience provides a detailed scientific explanation for how consciousness works, that'll put it all to rest. Of course, the mysticism camp doesn't believe this is possible even in principle, and there are likely to be some holdouts even after the problem is solved, just like we have flat earthers now.
- kranner 6y ago
  I wonder if the solution will turn out to have too many components to be satisfyingly understandable by humans, i.e. something like a 200-page proof that only a proof checker can validate. That may be a situation to confound both the mysterians and the non-mysterians.
  - klipt 6y ago
    Or a proof only creatures who znurg can understand https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/znurg-2 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/znurg-2
  - FeepingCreature 6y ago
    I expect the solution to turn out to be so simple that nobody will take it seriously.
  - lambdatronics 6y ago
    I think there's probably a few key conceptual ingredients at most, but it might be that the implementation is complicated. As an analogy: we know that mitochondria provide power to cells by oxidizing sugar and converting the energy to ADP/ATP, but how all of that actually gets carried out is very complex.
darawk 6y ago
But there is no mystery. Feeling is a self-referential concept. The concept of 'you' or 'me' 'feeling' presupposes a self, which smuggles in the conclusion that consciousness is related to some immaterial element. Feeling is just how we experience reward and punishment. It's an epiphenomena of our machinery for interpreting and interacting with the world. An intermediate representation, essentially.
- kranner 6y ago
  I don't see how even a minimally-feeling self necessarily involves something immaterial. I'm convinced there isn't anything immaterial or magical about my brain being able to feel things. It's how the feeling self arises at all that is the question here. > Feeling is just how we experience reward and punishment. It is that, but not just that. This behaviourist Skinnerian abstraction doesn't do it justice. It may be an epiphenomenon, but how it arises at all is the question of interest here.
- klipt 6y ago
  I think this comes down to a semantic dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_dispute We may be meat robots, but we are social meat robots, so it's not surprising many of us feel a desire to discuss our shared meat robot-ness, aka "consciousness".
  - GeneralMayhem 6y ago
    It is a semantic dispute, but in this case, it's an interesting one. The words in question are "I" and "feel". You even used the word: >many of us feel a desire Can you restate that clause without using any synonym for experience, subjectivity, consciousness, etc.? I posit that you can't, and the fact that you can't explain the most basic fact of existence except recursively is itself interesting.
    - FeepingCreature 6y ago
      Okay, first of all the fact that people cannot explain their experience does not invalidate their experience. Second of all, that is totally possible to explain if you know about the map-territory distinction and how it plays out psychologically. Basically, humans are meat robots whose brain contains a symbolic-experiential map of their surroundings, meaning it (among many other things) associates symbolic concepts with sensations. Since humans self-model as part of their social behavior, the map contains a representation of themselves. The map also contains a sensory input and associated symbolic representation for its own operation; the meat robot calls "the meat robot sensing in the map that the meat robot is modelling itself" consciousness or "being itself". Separately, it calls the concept it associates with itself "I" and the sensory input of operating the map "being".

lambdatronics 6y ago

The problem with these debates is that they turn into a referendum on how people feel about mysticism. Some want to think that a mysterious phenomenon like consciousness requires a solution that takes us beyond science into the mystical. Others can't stand mysticism, especially not in a field of scientific inquiry. If neuroscience provides a detailed scientific explanation for how consciousness works, that'll put it all to rest. Of course, the mysticism camp doesn't believe this is possible even in principle, and there are likely to be some holdouts even after the problem is solved, just like we have flat earthers now.

kranner 6y ago
I wonder if the solution will turn out to have too many components to be satisfyingly understandable by humans, i.e. something like a 200-page proof that only a proof checker can validate. That may be a situation to confound both the mysterians and the non-mysterians.
- klipt 6y ago
  Or a proof only creatures who znurg can understand https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/znurg-2 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/znurg-2
- FeepingCreature 6y ago
  I expect the solution to turn out to be so simple that nobody will take it seriously.
- lambdatronics 6y ago
  I think there's probably a few key conceptual ingredients at most, but it might be that the implementation is complicated. As an analogy: we know that mitochondria provide power to cells by oxidizing sugar and converting the energy to ADP/ATP, but how all of that actually gets carried out is very complex.

darawk 6y ago

But there is no mystery. Feeling is a self-referential concept. The concept of 'you' or 'me' 'feeling' presupposes a self, which smuggles in the conclusion that consciousness is related to some immaterial element. Feeling is just how we experience reward and punishment. It's an epiphenomena of our machinery for interpreting and interacting with the world. An intermediate representation, essentially.

kranner 6y ago
I don't see how even a minimally-feeling self necessarily involves something immaterial. I'm convinced there isn't anything immaterial or magical about my brain being able to feel things. It's how the feeling self arises at all that is the question here. > Feeling is just how we experience reward and punishment. It is that, but not just that. This behaviourist Skinnerian abstraction doesn't do it justice. It may be an epiphenomenon, but how it arises at all is the question of interest here.
klipt 6y ago
I think this comes down to a semantic dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_dispute We may be meat robots, but we are social meat robots, so it's not surprising many of us feel a desire to discuss our shared meat robot-ness, aka "consciousness".
- GeneralMayhem 6y ago
  It is a semantic dispute, but in this case, it's an interesting one. The words in question are "I" and "feel". You even used the word: >many of us feel a desire Can you restate that clause without using any synonym for experience, subjectivity, consciousness, etc.? I posit that you can't, and the fact that you can't explain the most basic fact of existence except recursively is itself interesting.
  - FeepingCreature 6y ago
    Okay, first of all the fact that people cannot explain their experience does not invalidate their experience. Second of all, that is totally possible to explain if you know about the map-territory distinction and how it plays out psychologically. Basically, humans are meat robots whose brain contains a symbolic-experiential map of their surroundings, meaning it (among many other things) associates symbolic concepts with sensations. Since humans self-model as part of their social behavior, the map contains a representation of themselves. The map also contains a sensory input and associated symbolic representation for its own operation; the meat robot calls "the meat robot sensing in the map that the meat robot is modelling itself" consciousness or "being itself". Separately, it calls the concept it associates with itself "I" and the sensory input of operating the map "being".