7 ms·

I've always wondered if self-awareness, free will, etc. is an illusion driven by evolution. You are more likely to defend yourself and attempt to prolong your

by cl42 5y ago

I've always wondered if self-awareness, free will, etc. is an illusion driven by evolution. You are more likely to defend yourself and attempt to prolong your life if you believe you are worthy of life -- that you have free will, that life is meaningful, etc. It would be evolutionarily advantageous for us to evolve a hard-coded belief that any time we question our self-awareness, consciousness, free will, etc. the hard-coded belief kicks in to say "yes, of course you have these things" and thus you will prolong your life, breed, and reinforce this. Curious if anyone has come across this in philosophical or biological readings.

guerrilla 5y ago
First, I definitely don't think self-awareness is an illusion (any more than anything else is.) You (i.e. your body) are clearly aware of yourself (i.e. your body.) QED. Second, your idea only works if there is also a mechanism that would cause us to value consciousness, free will, etc. You have to explain the reason that those things would make life "meaningful" (i.e. be motivational) for an animal. I'd argue, as the Devil's advocate, that they actually don't and we can probably live without them perfectly fine. I think some people do. I don't know if this solves anything, but the way that I think about it is that the the mind is just the body's UI to the body. The body is the machine and the operator of the machine and the mind is just like the Windows desktop. I think I got this from something Donald Hoffman said. He talks about ideas similar but different from yours by the way. Might be worth a search on YouTube for you. He definitely doesn't think we see reality the way it is and has accumulated good evidence and theory for that and has spent a lot of time connecting it to evolutionary biology.
- jwdunne 5y ago
  > You (i.e. your body) are clearly aware of yourself (i.e. your body.) QED. Reminds of “I think therefore I am” except a body doubting self-awareness shows the body is aware of the thing it doubts the existence of. Nice.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    Well, "I think therefore I am" is really question begging if taken as a deduction and can be ambiguous, depending on the speaker and context, since the referent of "I" is not always clear. (i.e. does it mean mind, body, soul, etc.) Something thinks though, and something is obviously aware; since you have direct empirical evidence of both. You don't need an argument for either.
  - podgaj 5y ago
    You should read "I am a Strange Loop". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop But it is an assumption that the body is aware of itself. That is part of the same illusion. When you dream, does that dream feel real?
    - PeterisP 5y ago
      I don't think I'm capable of actual introspection or self-awareness during a dream; I feel and experience certain things but IMHO I can apply my consciousness to these things to properly notice anything about them only afterwards when I wake up. I.e. the question "does that dream feel real" is only answerable when I have woken up and interpret my recent memories of that dream, which can easily be post-factum rationalization that has nothing to do with what I actually felt back when I was dreaming.
dvt 5y ago
> Curious if anyone has come across this in philosophical or biological readings. Yeah, this is touched on in Philosophy of Mind classes. It's just a very uninteresting and reductionist view that's probably wrong, so no one really takes it seriously, much like solipsism or the idea that we live in a simulation. Our entire experience informs us that the world is real, that other minds are real, that our own self-awareness and sense of me-ness is real. There's no real reason to doubt any of it, other than playing clever little logical gotcha' games. A caveat here is that philosophers do write about the reality of things in very deep and meaningful ways and Cartesian skepticism is certainly worth studying.
- podgaj 5y ago
  It is usually only when you wake up from a dream when you find out it was only a dream. You are making the mistake, as many do, of assuming that the illusion is not real. The illusion is real, but the ego, which is created by the illusion, is not real. One would say seeing a person floating during a magician act was real because we experienced it, but the only thing real was the illusion performed by the magician.
  - dvt 5y ago
    > You are making the mistake, as many do, of assuming that the illusion is not real. The illusion is real, but the ego, which is created by the illusion, is not real. Gobbledygook nonsense. People much smarter than both of us have been asking these questions since the dawn of time, best get to some reading.
    - wruza 5y ago
      “Some reading” consists of thousands of books, which some of us unfortunately(?) have no time to grep. Can you provide some concise excerpts which are to the point? It seems unlikely that this question is raised for the first time and there is no “wiki” to point to. Ps. I’m not “link!”-ing you, just asking for a way to learn something without burying myself for a lifetime into works which mostly disagree with each other.
d0mine 5y ago
It depends on what definition of "illusion" would be useful e.g., you don't see what your eyes receive, you see what your brain predicts (hallucinates). All models are false, some are useful.
podgaj 5y ago
Any Buddhist or Daoist will tell you the self is an illusion. Not that it does not exist, but that it is not self. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anattā#No_denial_of_self https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anattā#No_denial_of_self All we are is a bundle of our six senses (the 6th sense being thought). If you take away these senses, where are you? We need a sense of self to navigate our way through the world, and the senses help the brain create time and space and movement.
- mrwnmonm 5y ago
  I don't see how is this different What do you mean by thought exactly? I guess you don't mean thinking, because you still aware of yourself if you are not thinking about something. But if by "thought" you mean "awareness" or "consciousness", then that doesn't add anything. And of course, if you take it away there is nothing left.
  - trevyn 5y ago
    > And of course, if you take it away there is nothing left. Exactly.
- nefitty 5y ago
  I imagine founts of sense experience, each a node with a stream of information reaching the brain. Taste, touch, etc each are streams that meet at the brain, are filtered, interpreted then digested. The brain has some emergent sense streams, like thinking, which it feeds back into itself. If we turned each node/stream off one at a time, the brain eventually generates simulations of each stream. This is how sensory deprivation hallucinations occur. It's fascinating to think that our sense of self is a modular construction. It's so easily disrupted. Viewing it from this frame of modularity makes it much easier to understand no-self. The internet feels very real, but has no physical form. If everyone turned off their computers there would be no internet. Like our sense of self, its emergence is dependent on the whole, not individual parts. A brain without sense organs is not a self, a computer without a network is not the internet. Our selves are fleeting, made up of transitory, temporary information. "The internet feels proud today" is an absurd sentence. Isn't it absurd then to say "I feel proud," if 'I' is an amalgamation of sensory information? Sorry for the digression, I let the meditation you triggered run free.
cyberpunk 5y ago
Buddhism has rather a lot to say about this. I’d recommend some Dōgen but it’s quite dense stuff.
- podgaj 5y ago
  Here is a series of writings on this from a series of Buddhist writers that might fit the audience a bit better: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/various/wheel202.html https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/various/wheel202...
  - cyberpunk 5y ago
    Unfortunately with almost all this stuff you realise quickly it’s been written by someone with an understanding of nonduality, which makes it not so useful to anyone who doesn’t. Which is almost everyone.. I mean, we can actually explain fairly simply once you understand it but for anyone who hasn’t spent two years on the cushion it’s indecipherable. Saying “I am every cup of tea and lion” maybe makes sense to me, but probably not to others? I wish we had a way to communicate this stuff better, we’ve been trying for a long time..
    - moobsen 5y ago
      I share your wish, but I think that a big part of this is actually only understandable through experience. Just like you cannot really describe an unknown taste to someone, or describe colors to a blind person, etc.
      - trevyn 5y ago
        Apparently there is some work with transcranial ultrasound that can instantaneously turn hallucinations on and off…
chanakya 5y ago
An illusion can only happen to conscious beings, so saying that it's an illusion doesn't add anything explanatory to the mystery of consciousness.
- simonh 5y ago
  I’m not sure that’s true, it depends how you define an illusion. One would be to say that Illusions are merely incorrect interpretations of sensory data. They can be experienced by beetles, and even amoeba. A more sophisticated definition might say that an illusion is when a subject, which has a mental model of a situation, incorrectly interprets sensory data to create a major mismatch between their mental model of a situation and reality. If we take this definition, then since many mammals or even vertebrates construct mental models of situations, they can all experience illusions. For example an animal seeing a reflection of itself, or it’s prey.
  - Winsaucerer 5y ago
    > incorrect interpretations > they can all experience illusions > mental model The OP was trying to explain away consciousness as some illusion, while the person you responded to rightly pointed out "An illusion can only happen to conscious beings, so saying that it's an illusion doesn't add anything explanatory to the mystery of consciousness". Your attempt to define/explain what 'illusion' might be is similarly unhelpful, because you are appealing to mental/consciousness related terms like 'interpretation', 'experience', and 'mental model'. It seems like you're depending on the very thing you're trying to explain away, just as the original 'illusion' claim did.
jeffschofield 5y ago
As usual it really depends on what you individually are referring to when you use the words "self-awareness" or "free will". Even "illusion" in this context could refer to something other than what you might expect. It really muddies the waters when seeking clarity on these questions, as it often seems like people don't even agree on the referent in the first place. Based on your description this view sounds like it would be in the wheelhouse of the likes of Dan Dennett and Keith Frankish, the latter of which argues for a view called Illusionism [0]. Just note in this case "illusion" doesn't mean "not real", but more like "isn't what you think it is". [0] https://keithfrankish.github.io/articles/Frankish_Illusionism%20as%20a%20theory%20of%20consciousness_eprint.pdf https://keithfrankish.github.io/articles/Frankish_Illusionis...
someonewhocar3s 5y ago
You are more likely to defend yourself if you're moving forward in time. You are more likely to defend yourself if you're living by the week. You are more likely to defend yourself as yourself as yourself as yourself as yourself. What is your response if not your innate response? Was the relevant measurement dot projection of what's true something that wasn't you? Did you step out of line? Clock still ticks. Aren't you more likely to give if the illusion draws you? Doesn't the illusion poke the thought that it came from one? Why else would you wonder that? A stimulus (series) result, isn't that what you are? You'd say hi but apriori, did I? The idea is that your responses are your own, and the rest is just what it is. Your inception was automatic, gradually more of it was you, but it follows from what happened to you what you became, unless it's just an evolutionary outgrowth that could be the next one most just as well. Certainly, you're just hiding the truth under the next sheath, the next convolution, the next skin wrapping the further and further selves. Why else would it become a riddle, of all things, of something you could answer? Of course, you'd come with the unlikely answer; there is a variable to a function, such that the variable is my inception point or reference frame, and the function is the universe. Whoever would come up with such a rarified number? And what would be the point? Oh, blink the words from neuron to neuron, of course. Worries are alleviated by ease. Another moment, and it's gone. Inside it already understands. What do we tell it? Tell it it's just another post, by just another poster. The next post, maybe that's Food. "We have produced a seperate thinker, and a seperate fighter" said the Queen after she had trained one just for it. Nothing could penetrate the scalar economies of the irreduceable, inaliable, temporary existance one finds one's self as. Live or dead? Check and tell. The clock ticks audiably another line, as it's event horizon C-squares out in all directions. Sum of least squares, regression learned, breakout as precision is amplitude, free choice? It already happened. The clocks' event horizon would sigh for size but it was too short, and it gulped as it's final size turned out just another infinitisimality, not worth achieving until after. As far is the event horizon is concerned, it might as well have been the last tick. Eventually, though, something will pull it off it's stability, as the long hand shakes it's auditive moment over its midpoint, atomic vibration to atomic vibration, there's a few direction to go. How does the ryhme go? "in's over, out's inevitable, here's happened before you thought to check"? No that's not it. Infinitesimal is thin enough, but it's perfectly floral in all directions, not sharp to the cut. But there must come such that that tick'd never gone, or it'd be stable to the test beyond time. Inside, we already knew and it was debated to be best posed no question. Everytime we bring it up, it goes back down. One day we'll go around that corner, you as I, and you'll truly stand upon your own. Or, keep your model steady- this is text on the Internet, now where is 'the text on the Internet' and what has alltogether become of it? Because a temporial moment is only it's ti-
simonh 5y ago
It very much depends what people mean when they say consciousness or self awareness is an illusion. For example, we only spend spend small portions of our lives in a fully conciliatory state aware of the present. Much of the time we are in undressing sleep, or in a state of fugue or flow in which we are acting unconsciously. When we become consciously aware of the present sometimes it can be disorienting as we transition into full consciousness. So consciousness comes and goes frequently every day. I imagine these semi-conscious or flow states are the standard mental mode for many animals. Thus consciousness if not illusory is certainly ephemeral and transitory. Then there’s the fact that our conscious experience of the rodent is largely synthetic. That is, in many ways it is a post-hoc construction. We take many actions unconsciously and then construct post-hoc logical justifications for why we did them. We experience deja vu, or e.g. when a phone rings sometimes we think we experienced knowing the phones was going to ring before we are aware of the sound. We construct a conscious experience after the fact and sometimes we get it wrong. Conscious thoughts are only a small part of our ongoing mental activity, including decision making, and not always in the driving seat. We are so much more than our conscious experience, which is only a fairly small subset of our actual ongoing mental activity, which itself is continuously influenced by the needs and responses of the body beyond the brain.
xyzzy4747 5y ago
Consciousness itself is not an illusion. This is the hard problem of consciousness. However, your interpretation of reality is an illusion caused by hundreds of millions of years of evolution.
- RHSman2 5y ago
  If everybody’s interpretation of reality is an illusion, how do we know that consciousness is not all an illusion?
trevyn 5y ago
It doesn’t need to be hard-coded, it’s in the early educational curriculum, and socially reinforced at every turn.
_3u10 5y ago
It’s best to ask Pandas or biologists these questions and not philosophers. It’s all over biology, accepting this would mean the end of philosophy
andrei_says_ 5y ago
One of Advaita’s (“not two” - no duality teaching) pointers is to pay attention to one’s choices and try to observe “free will”. I became curious about it a few years ago - surely free will should be easy to see. So far I have not observed a single choice independent of environment, conditioning, bodily needs, desires, thoughts, instincts or personal preferences. I have not chosen any of the above. I may be the only human without free will, or maybe what we call free will is a bundle of things that we don’t have any control, or “will” over.
- vosper 5y ago
  What’s free will if it doesn’t include choices based on thought or preference? I’m not really sure what’s left when you exclude all the things you listed :)
  - andrei_says_ 5y ago
    Exactly, not “free.” I am still waiting to observe this “independent / free” authoring force that presumably I choose with.
- dlkf 5y ago
  The ancients had vastly a better take on free will (ie it is a completely incoherent notion) than the moderns.
me_me_me 5y ago
Split-brain patients studies. Though if you think about the results... I will just say if you are heavily grounded to idea of 'free will you' maybe skip on reading it. If you combine it with 'free-will' concept it paints a bleak picture of what is it to be conscious.

by cl42 5y ago

guerrilla 5y ago

First, I definitely don't think self-awareness is an illusion (any more than anything else is.) You (i.e. your body) are clearly aware of yourself (i.e. your body.) QED. Second, your idea only works if there is also a mechanism that would cause us to value consciousness, free will, etc. You have to explain the reason that those things would make life "meaningful" (i.e. be motivational) for an animal. I'd argue, as the Devil's advocate, that they actually don't and we can probably live without them perfectly fine. I think some people do. I don't know if this solves anything, but the way that I think about it is that the the mind is just the body's UI to the body. The body is the machine and the operator of the machine and the mind is just like the Windows desktop. I think I got this from something Donald Hoffman said. He talks about ideas similar but different from yours by the way. Might be worth a search on YouTube for you. He definitely doesn't think we see reality the way it is and has accumulated good evidence and theory for that and has spent a lot of time connecting it to evolutionary biology.

jwdunne 5y ago
> You (i.e. your body) are clearly aware of yourself (i.e. your body.) QED. Reminds of “I think therefore I am” except a body doubting self-awareness shows the body is aware of the thing it doubts the existence of. Nice.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  Well, "I think therefore I am" is really question begging if taken as a deduction and can be ambiguous, depending on the speaker and context, since the referent of "I" is not always clear. (i.e. does it mean mind, body, soul, etc.) Something thinks though, and something is obviously aware; since you have direct empirical evidence of both. You don't need an argument for either.
- podgaj 5y ago
  You should read "I am a Strange Loop". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop But it is an assumption that the body is aware of itself. That is part of the same illusion. When you dream, does that dream feel real?
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    I don't think I'm capable of actual introspection or self-awareness during a dream; I feel and experience certain things but IMHO I can apply my consciousness to these things to properly notice anything about them only afterwards when I wake up. I.e. the question "does that dream feel real" is only answerable when I have woken up and interpret my recent memories of that dream, which can easily be post-factum rationalization that has nothing to do with what I actually felt back when I was dreaming.

dvt 5y ago

> Curious if anyone has come across this in philosophical or biological readings. Yeah, this is touched on in Philosophy of Mind classes. It's just a very uninteresting and reductionist view that's probably wrong, so no one really takes it seriously, much like solipsism or the idea that we live in a simulation. Our entire experience informs us that the world is real, that other minds are real, that our own self-awareness and sense of me-ness is real. There's no real reason to doubt any of it, other than playing clever little logical gotcha' games. A caveat here is that philosophers do write about the reality of things in very deep and meaningful ways and Cartesian skepticism is certainly worth studying.

podgaj 5y ago
It is usually only when you wake up from a dream when you find out it was only a dream. You are making the mistake, as many do, of assuming that the illusion is not real. The illusion is real, but the ego, which is created by the illusion, is not real. One would say seeing a person floating during a magician act was real because we experienced it, but the only thing real was the illusion performed by the magician.
- dvt 5y ago
  > You are making the mistake, as many do, of assuming that the illusion is not real. The illusion is real, but the ego, which is created by the illusion, is not real. Gobbledygook nonsense. People much smarter than both of us have been asking these questions since the dawn of time, best get to some reading.
  - wruza 5y ago
    “Some reading” consists of thousands of books, which some of us unfortunately(?) have no time to grep. Can you provide some concise excerpts which are to the point? It seems unlikely that this question is raised for the first time and there is no “wiki” to point to. Ps. I’m not “link!”-ing you, just asking for a way to learn something without burying myself for a lifetime into works which mostly disagree with each other.

d0mine 5y ago

It depends on what definition of "illusion" would be useful e.g., you don't see what your eyes receive, you see what your brain predicts (hallucinates). All models are false, some are useful.

podgaj 5y ago

Any Buddhist or Daoist will tell you the self is an illusion. Not that it does not exist, but that it is not self. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anattā#No_denial_of_self https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anattā#No_denial_of_self All we are is a bundle of our six senses (the 6th sense being thought). If you take away these senses, where are you? We need a sense of self to navigate our way through the world, and the senses help the brain create time and space and movement.

mrwnmonm 5y ago
I don't see how is this different What do you mean by thought exactly? I guess you don't mean thinking, because you still aware of yourself if you are not thinking about something. But if by "thought" you mean "awareness" or "consciousness", then that doesn't add anything. And of course, if you take it away there is nothing left.
- trevyn 5y ago
  > And of course, if you take it away there is nothing left. Exactly.
nefitty 5y ago
I imagine founts of sense experience, each a node with a stream of information reaching the brain. Taste, touch, etc each are streams that meet at the brain, are filtered, interpreted then digested. The brain has some emergent sense streams, like thinking, which it feeds back into itself. If we turned each node/stream off one at a time, the brain eventually generates simulations of each stream. This is how sensory deprivation hallucinations occur. It's fascinating to think that our sense of self is a modular construction. It's so easily disrupted. Viewing it from this frame of modularity makes it much easier to understand no-self. The internet feels very real, but has no physical form. If everyone turned off their computers there would be no internet. Like our sense of self, its emergence is dependent on the whole, not individual parts. A brain without sense organs is not a self, a computer without a network is not the internet. Our selves are fleeting, made up of transitory, temporary information. "The internet feels proud today" is an absurd sentence. Isn't it absurd then to say "I feel proud," if 'I' is an amalgamation of sensory information? Sorry for the digression, I let the meditation you triggered run free.

cyberpunk 5y ago

Buddhism has rather a lot to say about this. I’d recommend some Dōgen but it’s quite dense stuff.

podgaj 5y ago
Here is a series of writings on this from a series of Buddhist writers that might fit the audience a bit better: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/various/wheel202.html https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/various/wheel202...
- cyberpunk 5y ago
  Unfortunately with almost all this stuff you realise quickly it’s been written by someone with an understanding of nonduality, which makes it not so useful to anyone who doesn’t. Which is almost everyone.. I mean, we can actually explain fairly simply once you understand it but for anyone who hasn’t spent two years on the cushion it’s indecipherable. Saying “I am every cup of tea and lion” maybe makes sense to me, but probably not to others? I wish we had a way to communicate this stuff better, we’ve been trying for a long time..
  - moobsen 5y ago
    I share your wish, but I think that a big part of this is actually only understandable through experience. Just like you cannot really describe an unknown taste to someone, or describe colors to a blind person, etc.
    - trevyn 5y ago
      Apparently there is some work with transcranial ultrasound that can instantaneously turn hallucinations on and off…

chanakya 5y ago

An illusion can only happen to conscious beings, so saying that it's an illusion doesn't add anything explanatory to the mystery of consciousness.

simonh 5y ago
I’m not sure that’s true, it depends how you define an illusion. One would be to say that Illusions are merely incorrect interpretations of sensory data. They can be experienced by beetles, and even amoeba. A more sophisticated definition might say that an illusion is when a subject, which has a mental model of a situation, incorrectly interprets sensory data to create a major mismatch between their mental model of a situation and reality. If we take this definition, then since many mammals or even vertebrates construct mental models of situations, they can all experience illusions. For example an animal seeing a reflection of itself, or it’s prey.
- Winsaucerer 5y ago
  > incorrect interpretations > they can all experience illusions > mental model The OP was trying to explain away consciousness as some illusion, while the person you responded to rightly pointed out "An illusion can only happen to conscious beings, so saying that it's an illusion doesn't add anything explanatory to the mystery of consciousness". Your attempt to define/explain what 'illusion' might be is similarly unhelpful, because you are appealing to mental/consciousness related terms like 'interpretation', 'experience', and 'mental model'. It seems like you're depending on the very thing you're trying to explain away, just as the original 'illusion' claim did.

jeffschofield 5y ago

As usual it really depends on what you individually are referring to when you use the words "self-awareness" or "free will". Even "illusion" in this context could refer to something other than what you might expect. It really muddies the waters when seeking clarity on these questions, as it often seems like people don't even agree on the referent in the first place. Based on your description this view sounds like it would be in the wheelhouse of the likes of Dan Dennett and Keith Frankish, the latter of which argues for a view called Illusionism [0]. Just note in this case "illusion" doesn't mean "not real", but more like "isn't what you think it is". [0] https://keithfrankish.github.io/articles/Frankish_Illusionism%20as%20a%20theory%20of%20consciousness_eprint.pdf https://keithfrankish.github.io/articles/Frankish_Illusionis...

someonewhocar3s 5y ago

You are more likely to defend yourself if you're moving forward in time. You are more likely to defend yourself if you're living by the week. You are more likely to defend yourself as yourself as yourself as yourself as yourself. What is your response if not your innate response? Was the relevant measurement dot projection of what's true something that wasn't you? Did you step out of line? Clock still ticks. Aren't you more likely to give if the illusion draws you? Doesn't the illusion poke the thought that it came from one? Why else would you wonder that? A stimulus (series) result, isn't that what you are? You'd say hi but apriori, did I? The idea is that your responses are your own, and the rest is just what it is. Your inception was automatic, gradually more of it was you, but it follows from what happened to you what you became, unless it's just an evolutionary outgrowth that could be the next one most just as well. Certainly, you're just hiding the truth under the next sheath, the next convolution, the next skin wrapping the further and further selves. Why else would it become a riddle, of all things, of something you could answer? Of course, you'd come with the unlikely answer; there is a variable to a function, such that the variable is my inception point or reference frame, and the function is the universe. Whoever would come up with such a rarified number? And what would be the point? Oh, blink the words from neuron to neuron, of course. Worries are alleviated by ease. Another moment, and it's gone. Inside it already understands. What do we tell it? Tell it it's just another post, by just another poster. The next post, maybe that's Food. "We have produced a seperate thinker, and a seperate fighter" said the Queen after she had trained one just for it. Nothing could penetrate the scalar economies of the irreduceable, inaliable, temporary existance one finds one's self as. Live or dead? Check and tell. The clock ticks audiably another line, as it's event horizon C-squares out in all directions. Sum of least squares, regression learned, breakout as precision is amplitude, free choice? It already happened. The clocks' event horizon would sigh for size but it was too short, and it gulped as it's final size turned out just another infinitisimality, not worth achieving until after. As far is the event horizon is concerned, it might as well have been the last tick. Eventually, though, something will pull it off it's stability, as the long hand shakes it's auditive moment over its midpoint, atomic vibration to atomic vibration, there's a few direction to go. How does the ryhme go? "in's over, out's inevitable, here's happened before you thought to check"? No that's not it. Infinitesimal is thin enough, but it's perfectly floral in all directions, not sharp to the cut. But there must come such that that tick'd never gone, or it'd be stable to the test beyond time. Inside, we already knew and it was debated to be best posed no question. Everytime we bring it up, it goes back down. One day we'll go around that corner, you as I, and you'll truly stand upon your own. Or, keep your model steady- this is text on the Internet, now where is 'the text on the Internet' and what has alltogether become of it? Because a temporial moment is only it's ti-

simonh 5y ago

It very much depends what people mean when they say consciousness or self awareness is an illusion. For example, we only spend spend small portions of our lives in a fully conciliatory state aware of the present. Much of the time we are in undressing sleep, or in a state of fugue or flow in which we are acting unconsciously. When we become consciously aware of the present sometimes it can be disorienting as we transition into full consciousness. So consciousness comes and goes frequently every day. I imagine these semi-conscious or flow states are the standard mental mode for many animals. Thus consciousness if not illusory is certainly ephemeral and transitory. Then there’s the fact that our conscious experience of the rodent is largely synthetic. That is, in many ways it is a post-hoc construction. We take many actions unconsciously and then construct post-hoc logical justifications for why we did them. We experience deja vu, or e.g. when a phone rings sometimes we think we experienced knowing the phones was going to ring before we are aware of the sound. We construct a conscious experience after the fact and sometimes we get it wrong. Conscious thoughts are only a small part of our ongoing mental activity, including decision making, and not always in the driving seat. We are so much more than our conscious experience, which is only a fairly small subset of our actual ongoing mental activity, which itself is continuously influenced by the needs and responses of the body beyond the brain.

xyzzy4747 5y ago

Consciousness itself is not an illusion. This is the hard problem of consciousness. However, your interpretation of reality is an illusion caused by hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

RHSman2 5y ago
If everybody’s interpretation of reality is an illusion, how do we know that consciousness is not all an illusion?

trevyn 5y ago

It doesn’t need to be hard-coded, it’s in the early educational curriculum, and socially reinforced at every turn.

_3u10 5y ago

It’s best to ask Pandas or biologists these questions and not philosophers. It’s all over biology, accepting this would mean the end of philosophy

andrei_says_ 5y ago

One of Advaita’s (“not two” - no duality teaching) pointers is to pay attention to one’s choices and try to observe “free will”. I became curious about it a few years ago - surely free will should be easy to see. So far I have not observed a single choice independent of environment, conditioning, bodily needs, desires, thoughts, instincts or personal preferences. I have not chosen any of the above. I may be the only human without free will, or maybe what we call free will is a bundle of things that we don’t have any control, or “will” over.

vosper 5y ago
What’s free will if it doesn’t include choices based on thought or preference? I’m not really sure what’s left when you exclude all the things you listed :)
- andrei_says_ 5y ago
  Exactly, not “free.” I am still waiting to observe this “independent / free” authoring force that presumably I choose with.
dlkf 5y ago
The ancients had vastly a better take on free will (ie it is a completely incoherent notion) than the moderns.

me_me_me 5y ago

Split-brain patients studies. Though if you think about the results... I will just say if you are heavily grounded to idea of 'free will you' maybe skip on reading it. If you combine it with 'free-will' concept it paints a bleak picture of what is it to be conscious.