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> If you think about it, the universe is conscious, because our conscious minds are part of it Hell of a leap. I subscribe to the notion the consciousness is a

> If you think about it, the universe is conscious, because our conscious minds are part of it Hell of a leap. I subscribe to the notion the consciousness is a illusion via chemical whatever and the universe doesn't give a damn anyway.

garbagetime 5y ago
What does it mean for consciousness to be an illusion?
- NikolaeVarius 5y ago
  It means that consciousness nothing special/supernatural. There is no soul, there is nothing but chemical reactions that manage to create something that is able to claim "I think therefore I am" The illusion is the fact that we claim that we are able to "experience", but I think that its all just layers of GOTO reactions that create something that think its special. Much like how a program isn't considered conscious, but its very likely its because we haven't dug deeply enough into the layers of shit that is required to make a self-aware computer
  - huetius 5y ago
    You seem to have a lot of confidence in the truth of your own meaningless sequence of GOTO reactions.
- badinfo 5y ago
  We as a species may lack the mental faculties to truly understand the mechanisms by which life evolved the ability to analyze and reason about its surroundings and itself. We lack the scientific tools to properly differentiate or falsify "consciousness" from any other sufficiently complex phenomenon. We can't tell whether it's an emergent phenomenon arising out of a particular arrangement of energy and matter, or whether it requires some input that we cannot currently observe/measure, or something else entirely. We don't know whether we can create consciousness from its constituent parts, or if it even has constituent parts. We don't know if there's a finite supply of it in the universe, we don't know if it's a dimensional thing, we don't know how it interacts with other forces. We do know that it appears as though we have much more agency than a rock, yes, but it's a matter of degree how much more when we compare ourselves to other lifeforms, primates, dolphins, elephants, ravens... or other people. We don't know if certain members of our species are "more" or "less" conscious. We don't fully know what happens to consciousness during comas or brain death or dream states or sleep. It's just an ambiguous term that we apply to the "state of human information processing that we can't really explain". Substitute "ambiguous" for "illusion" if you prefer, but it could also very well be an illusion the same way centrifugal force is a pseudo-force, i.e. the measurement of consciousness depends on some reference frame that we don't know how to use yet. It's entirely possible that consciousness is NOT an illusion, that it is indeed a special "thing" in the universe, but we can't prove that with the science, language, philosophy, and possibly mental capacity that we currently have. Maybe one day we will. Maybe not. But it's premature to assume we understand anything about consciousness in the philosophical sense.
  - bsanr2 5y ago
    That doesn't really answer the question, and now I'm invested in the prospect of hearing one, too.
    - badinfo 5y ago
      Sorry, I tried. Hearing one of what?
  - Bobylonian 5y ago
    Why are you concentrating on individual animals, where herd behaviour of them can not be explained by behavior of individual. Same applies to people - there are enough of examples in history of groups of people believing in God and his plan and that belief has led to catastrophic consequences for tribes and even nations... For all I know nothing really matters - Sun can go Nova or Earth can be hit by a small planet and Life on earth can go extinct.
    - badinfo 5y ago
      I don't understand what you're trying to point out. That groups of things can have behaviors that lone individuals don't exhibit? Yes, that is true, whether at the atomic level or the cellular level or the family level or the population level or the species level or the ecosystem level... it's very fascinating, to be sure, but in what way does that prove or disprove any sort of god? It's just the same Watchmaker argument, i.e. that complexity requires a maker, which it arguably does not. Complex behaviors, even flock behaviors, can evolve from the sum of its constituent parts. A pinball machine with eight balls in play will react very different from one with a single ball or no balls, but nobody accuses the pinball machine of being sentient (or if they did, I'd really like to play that machine). > For all I know nothing really matters - Sun can go Nova or Earth can be hit by a small planet and Life on earth can go extinct. Yes, and? I wouldn't worry about it too much... you'll likely die from something far more banal, like plain old climate-change-driven political instability, North Korea, the next anti-vax movement, etc.
- glopes 5y ago
  By definition, it simply means that consciousness is not what it appears to be. It doesn’t, however, imply that consciousness does not exist.
ImprobableTruth 5y ago
How could you possibly deny the existence of your subjective experience? This is just utterly incomprehensible to me.
- handrous 5y ago
  It's not a denial of the existence of subjective experience. It's a denial that it "means anything" or has any influence on events.
- badinfo 5y ago
  What's the philosophical difference between your subjective experience of existence and a 90s-style power-on-self-test? "I am on. I can tell that I am on. I dunno what I think once I am off." Same could be said of man, machine, consciousness, whatever. What's incomprehensible is the baseless belief that consciousness is some special state of existence unique to balding, violent apes floating around a wet rock, anthropomorphizing all the crap around them just to make themselves feel special.
  - ImprobableTruth 5y ago
    Huh? Subjective experience is about whether the machine experiences the power-on-self-test, not about what it emits externally. Animals, machines or even rocks might all be conscious, but we simply don't know because it's impossible to ascertain through external means. >What's incomprehensible is the baseless belief that consciousness is some special state of existence unique to balding, violent apes floating around a wet rock, anthropomorphizing all the crap around them just to make themselves feel special. What a ridiculous strawman.
    - bserge 5y ago
      A machine does "experience" it, even if through a very limited number of sensors and logic.
    - badinfo 5y ago
      > but we simply don't know because it's impossible to ascertain through external means. Yeah, exactly. We haven't developed a good enough Turing test -- for machines, people, or gods. > What a ridiculous strawman. I don't believe is a strawman as much as you think it is. A lot of arguments for consciousness derive from the desire for humans to be special, which is in turn derived from Abrahamic cosmology that places us directly beneath their God.
lhorie 5y ago
While I can see where this idea comes from, it seems a bit... self-defeating in a way? At least pragmatically speaking, there's an obvious difference between your point of view and that of the universe: if it's all a big illusion, then presumably there's no point in pursuing anything since it's all inconsequential anyways. And yet here we are clacking on keyboards sending electrons into a mesh of wires and circuitry for some reason. The universe may not care about you, but the implication is that you don't necessarily care about what "it" thinks either, but you definitely care about what you as an individual think. And in a similarly clinical view of the universe, it doesn't even make sense to anthropomorphize it in the first place, since there's no evidence that the universe has the capability or inclination of empathizing with a human. That leaves us with things that actually are anthropomorphic (other people), and I'd posit that societies are a pretty good example of a complex interaction between many things that are presumably on autorun, and yet are able to work together towards some commonly aligned purpose that has collective meaning on some level higher than just chemicals interacting in particular ways.

garbagetime 5y ago

What does it mean for consciousness to be an illusion?

NikolaeVarius 5y ago
It means that consciousness nothing special/supernatural. There is no soul, there is nothing but chemical reactions that manage to create something that is able to claim "I think therefore I am" The illusion is the fact that we claim that we are able to "experience", but I think that its all just layers of GOTO reactions that create something that think its special. Much like how a program isn't considered conscious, but its very likely its because we haven't dug deeply enough into the layers of shit that is required to make a self-aware computer
- huetius 5y ago
  You seem to have a lot of confidence in the truth of your own meaningless sequence of GOTO reactions.
badinfo 5y ago
We as a species may lack the mental faculties to truly understand the mechanisms by which life evolved the ability to analyze and reason about its surroundings and itself. We lack the scientific tools to properly differentiate or falsify "consciousness" from any other sufficiently complex phenomenon. We can't tell whether it's an emergent phenomenon arising out of a particular arrangement of energy and matter, or whether it requires some input that we cannot currently observe/measure, or something else entirely. We don't know whether we can create consciousness from its constituent parts, or if it even has constituent parts. We don't know if there's a finite supply of it in the universe, we don't know if it's a dimensional thing, we don't know how it interacts with other forces. We do know that it appears as though we have much more agency than a rock, yes, but it's a matter of degree how much more when we compare ourselves to other lifeforms, primates, dolphins, elephants, ravens... or other people. We don't know if certain members of our species are "more" or "less" conscious. We don't fully know what happens to consciousness during comas or brain death or dream states or sleep. It's just an ambiguous term that we apply to the "state of human information processing that we can't really explain". Substitute "ambiguous" for "illusion" if you prefer, but it could also very well be an illusion the same way centrifugal force is a pseudo-force, i.e. the measurement of consciousness depends on some reference frame that we don't know how to use yet. It's entirely possible that consciousness is NOT an illusion, that it is indeed a special "thing" in the universe, but we can't prove that with the science, language, philosophy, and possibly mental capacity that we currently have. Maybe one day we will. Maybe not. But it's premature to assume we understand anything about consciousness in the philosophical sense.
- bsanr2 5y ago
  That doesn't really answer the question, and now I'm invested in the prospect of hearing one, too.
  - badinfo 5y ago
    Sorry, I tried. Hearing one of what?
- Bobylonian 5y ago
  Why are you concentrating on individual animals, where herd behaviour of them can not be explained by behavior of individual. Same applies to people - there are enough of examples in history of groups of people believing in God and his plan and that belief has led to catastrophic consequences for tribes and even nations... For all I know nothing really matters - Sun can go Nova or Earth can be hit by a small planet and Life on earth can go extinct.
  - badinfo 5y ago
    I don't understand what you're trying to point out. That groups of things can have behaviors that lone individuals don't exhibit? Yes, that is true, whether at the atomic level or the cellular level or the family level or the population level or the species level or the ecosystem level... it's very fascinating, to be sure, but in what way does that prove or disprove any sort of god? It's just the same Watchmaker argument, i.e. that complexity requires a maker, which it arguably does not. Complex behaviors, even flock behaviors, can evolve from the sum of its constituent parts. A pinball machine with eight balls in play will react very different from one with a single ball or no balls, but nobody accuses the pinball machine of being sentient (or if they did, I'd really like to play that machine). > For all I know nothing really matters - Sun can go Nova or Earth can be hit by a small planet and Life on earth can go extinct. Yes, and? I wouldn't worry about it too much... you'll likely die from something far more banal, like plain old climate-change-driven political instability, North Korea, the next anti-vax movement, etc.
glopes 5y ago
By definition, it simply means that consciousness is not what it appears to be. It doesn’t, however, imply that consciousness does not exist.

ImprobableTruth 5y ago

How could you possibly deny the existence of your subjective experience? This is just utterly incomprehensible to me.

handrous 5y ago
It's not a denial of the existence of subjective experience. It's a denial that it "means anything" or has any influence on events.
badinfo 5y ago
What's the philosophical difference between your subjective experience of existence and a 90s-style power-on-self-test? "I am on. I can tell that I am on. I dunno what I think once I am off." Same could be said of man, machine, consciousness, whatever. What's incomprehensible is the baseless belief that consciousness is some special state of existence unique to balding, violent apes floating around a wet rock, anthropomorphizing all the crap around them just to make themselves feel special.
- ImprobableTruth 5y ago
  Huh? Subjective experience is about whether the machine experiences the power-on-self-test, not about what it emits externally. Animals, machines or even rocks might all be conscious, but we simply don't know because it's impossible to ascertain through external means. >What's incomprehensible is the baseless belief that consciousness is some special state of existence unique to balding, violent apes floating around a wet rock, anthropomorphizing all the crap around them just to make themselves feel special. What a ridiculous strawman.
  - bserge 5y ago
    A machine does "experience" it, even if through a very limited number of sensors and logic.
  - badinfo 5y ago
    > but we simply don't know because it's impossible to ascertain through external means. Yeah, exactly. We haven't developed a good enough Turing test -- for machines, people, or gods. > What a ridiculous strawman. I don't believe is a strawman as much as you think it is. A lot of arguments for consciousness derive from the desire for humans to be special, which is in turn derived from Abrahamic cosmology that places us directly beneath their God.

lhorie 5y ago

While I can see where this idea comes from, it seems a bit... self-defeating in a way? At least pragmatically speaking, there's an obvious difference between your point of view and that of the universe: if it's all a big illusion, then presumably there's no point in pursuing anything since it's all inconsequential anyways. And yet here we are clacking on keyboards sending electrons into a mesh of wires and circuitry for some reason. The universe may not care about you, but the implication is that you don't necessarily care about what "it" thinks either, but you definitely care about what you as an individual think. And in a similarly clinical view of the universe, it doesn't even make sense to anthropomorphize it in the first place, since there's no evidence that the universe has the capability or inclination of empathizing with a human. That leaves us with things that actually are anthropomorphic (other people), and I'd posit that societies are a pretty good example of a complex interaction between many things that are presumably on autorun, and yet are able to work together towards some commonly aligned purpose that has collective meaning on some level higher than just chemicals interacting in particular ways.