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What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

xweber 5y ago
Thanks for the link. I agree with Seth that consciousness is much like a controlled hallucination - after all, we don't experience reality directly, but through the predictions of our brain. But then the question is, why do you need this hallucination? I suspect that consciousness evolved because it makes an organism more capable than one who doesn't. But what does consciousness offer over just taking in sensory input and making predictions without having qualia (much like a computer does)?
- wruza 5y ago
  Is it the fact that a computer doesn’t have one of a sort?
- FeepingCreature 5y ago
  I think the important part is that you can represent more things in consciousness than just "five-sense data", ie. exotic sense data like emotions, reactions, imagination, memory, impulses, selfhood, and correlate them with the ordinary sensory data. A non-conscious animal may see a predator and get scared, but I don't know if it knows that it's scared because of the predator. I think you need an integrated space for both direct data and metadata for that. Also, in humans, I'd presume that consciousness, being introspectable, relates to our ability to understand our own interests and behaviors, and those of others, in symbolic terms and express them with language. It's how we close the circle between thinking and "I think". (I agree with the article that people vastly overestimate the mystery of consciousness.) PS: I think consciousness being introspectable is very underrated. We can perceive memories of perception, we can feel nostalgic for having felt a certain way in the past, and we can realize and name that we are doing this. The "reentrancy" of consciousness is a core aspect of our cognitive and strategic flexibility.
  - tremon 5y ago
    A non-conscious animal may see a predator and get scared This is maybe just a matter of definition, but I find it highly unlikely that that scenario exists. "Seeing" a predator already requires so much higher-level processing (not just the visual cues, but the analysis and classification) that I find it unlikely the animal does not have a working distinction between intra-body and outside-world sensations. The problem with defining "consciousness" is that we do not have reliable inter-species communication to compare notes between species, so our definition of consciousness itself is hampered by the ability to communicate that sense of consciousness to each other. Already in your post, there's seven different interpretations of what "consciousness" could actually mean: - ability to recall past experiences ("emotions", "memory") - awareness of the self ("impulses", "selfhood") - ability to conceive experiences that do not correspond with sensory inputs ("imagination") - meta-awareness of instinctual reactions ("if it knows that it's scared because of the predator") - introspection ("our ability to understand our own interests and behaviors") - empathy ("and those of others") - communicating our sense of self to others ("express them with language") Personally, I think we should assume that all animal species possess the first four, all large mammals can do the first five, and many species have the ability to do the sixth (it's been proven in dogs, apes, parrots, crows, and dolphins -- and probably others).
    - mrkramer 5y ago
      All the things you mentioned are products of evolution invented for the purpose of increasing survival rate. For example emotions serve us mammals to bond with each other, bring us closer together so that we help each other in order to survive.
- Sosh101 5y ago
  The hallucination analogy is useful I think in some ways, in that it could allow access to a view of reality that has important parts represented in a meaningful way. But, surely a hallucination requires an underlying consciousness to experience it? So for me it's not very useful in explaining the phenonmenon of consciousness itself. It seems that it's not far removed from the old "theatre" analogy, which requires an unexplained "homunculus" (and probably homunculi ad infinitum).
- Aardwolf 5y ago
  Explanations like "consciousness is a controlled hallucination" or "consciousness is just an illusion" don't answer anything for me. To be able to have a hallucination or an illusion, you still need the consciousness experiencing that. Explain that consciousness. > I suspect that consciousness evolved because it makes an organism more capable than one who doesn't. You can't prove consciousness from behavior (afaik), and it's behavior that makes organisms more capable
  - grumbel 5y ago
    > "consciousness is just an illusion" Replace "illusion" with "perception" and it will make a lot more sense. Consciousness does obviously exist in one form or another, but when people think intuitively about consciousness they imagine it as an actor. A little guy in your head that looks at the world and makes decisions. That's the illusion. That "little guy", that "self", isn't the one doing the work, your brain is the one doing the work. The little guy is a how the brain tries to make sens of itself. Just like photons hitting your eyeballs might be interpreted as cats and dogs out there in the world, the brain interprets or perceives whatever it is doing internally as a "self". > You can't prove consciousness from behavior (afaik) Without some sens of self any creature would have a pretty difficult time surviving, as it wouldn't be able to tell itself apart from the rest of the world.
    - Aardwolf 5y ago
      > The little guy is a how the brain tries to make sens of itself. That still doesn't explain consciousness itself. Though I think there are many different interpretations and definitions for the word consciousness so we might be talking about a different one. > Without some sens of self any creature would have a pretty difficult time surviving, as it wouldn't be able to tell itself apart from the rest of the world. A cell just replicates because that's what the molecules in it happen to do
      - grumbel 5y ago
        > That still doesn't explain consciousness itself. Well, which part doesn't it explain? It's pretty conclusive as far as I am concerned. As among other things, you can explain why philosophers would even ask that question in the first place. > A cell just replicates because that's what the molecules in it happen to do And transistors just go on and off, yet people still spend years studying computer science. The existence of simple mechanism at one level doesn't prevent higher order mechanism at another, quite the opposite. Those cells aren't going to do much replicating when you get killed by a tiger, some awareness of yourself and the environment helps prevent that.
- ikrenji 5y ago
  maybe consciousness is a side effect, an emergent phenomena. once the brain gets complicated enough it will just arise (on a scale)... also are our decisions ours? or some inner layer in us creates the decision and then we just consciously observe it / let it play out...
  - watercooler_guy 5y ago
    >maybe consciousness is a side effect, an emergent phenomena. once the brain gets complicated enough it will just arise (on a scale) This is my feeling too. Since the brain is just physical matter arranged a certain way, doing a certain type of processing, I really think it possible that some computer programs we use today are also doing the right kind of processing to grant them a simple subjective inner experience. Of course most programs don’t have a way to tell us if that’s the case, except maybe GPT-3 :) > are our decisions ours? or some inner layer in us creates the decision and then we just consciously observe it / let it play out I have evidence for it being the latter: our higher brain functions let us rationalize, to ourselves, the decisions that were deterministically made by our subconscious, so it feels like “you” made the decisions “because you wanted to”. People who have the connection between their brain hemispheres severed can unconsciously reach a decision in one hemisphere, but then consciously rationalize it in the other hemisphere, without having experienced the making of the decision [0]: >In one example of this kind of test, a picture of a chicken claw was flashed to the left hemisphere and a picture of a snow scene to the right hemisphere. Of the array of pictures placed in front of the subject, the obviously correct association is a chicken for the chicken claw and a shovel for the snow scene. Patient P.S. responded by choosing the shovel with the left hand and the chicken with the right. When asked why he chose these items, his left hemisphere replied `Oh, that's simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed'. Here the left brain, observing the left hand's response, interprets that response in a context consistent with its sphere of knowledge—one that does not include information about the left hemifield snow scene. [0] https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/123/7/1293/380106 https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/123/7/1293/380106
- raducu 5y ago
  We obviously don't have the full picture about sensations -- they might be a side effect of specialized (biochemical) neural architectures, but more likely there is something intrinsic to them that grants advantages to sensations. There's something to making things really "personal" to an individual system having sensations that make it act in its best interest. Sensations are also very flexible biochemical abstractions and solutions to problems across aeons. It would have been quite hard for organisms to evolve without such abstractions -- like a worm recoiling in pain and a human quickly rettacting his burnt hand or avoiding certain kinds of people who have hurt him before.
- tgv 5y ago
  > we don't experience reality directly That muddies the water, IMO. We do experience reality directly: our nerve endings do. The next step is processing, which is somewhat mediated by low-level expectations. This takes place at sub-conscious levels. Conscious perception comes much later, and is obviously more filtered. To call it a hallucination is word play.
  - pwm 5y ago
    > We do experience reality directly: our nerve endings do. Depending on how you define "reality" we only experience a tiny subset of it. We can only see/hear/touch/smell/taste a very restricted universe, only what our "antennas" can detect. In fact I would argue that we experience close to 0% of all of reality. On top of this extremely restricted input our processing of it is imperfect which means some of what we experience has nothing to do with reality.
    - tgv 5y ago
      Restricted as it may be, we experience reality. Experiencing reality completely is impossible anyway. And in the context of hallucination, what we can't experience doesn't matter.
      - pwm 5y ago
        Sure, I don't disagree but (to me anyway) it's important to point out the difference between reality vs. our potential intake from it. The blind men and the elephant parable applies.
  - ThrustVectoring 5y ago
    There are fixed patterns in still images that appear to move when we perceive them. "We don't experience reality directly" and calling it a hallucination seems apt - the thing we experience when we look at things is less "what's actually there" and more "the best guess our brain can construct about what's there". Additional examples of this include the non-perception of the visual blind spot, how the brain fills in details in the middle of saccades, and how task-specific training causes perceptual differences (eg, thrown baseballs look bigger to professional batters).
- noiv 5y ago
  I think the most simple explanation is the brain runs a simulation of its environment and at some point after birth it puts its human into this simulation. That's probably when children start using the word 'I' and raise a consciousness.
- davidhs 5y ago
  I think what you mean by reality is physical reality, if so then it is impossible for us to directly experience it. You are a simulated being in a simulated world. The simulated world runs on a physical brain. Everything you experience is "hallucinations," but if your physical brain works normally then they will be constrained to explain the input to the brain. Consciousness is most likely a property or set of properties of this simulation. Some part of your brain make predictive models of its input, and the things that it models is yourself, your current environment, other stuff going on (the mind), how these things relate to each other and such. My guess is that qualia is something like primitives to this simulated world.
- 50 5y ago
  Had this thought recently: The function of psychedelics is not to induce hallucinations, but to help you recognize that you’re always already hallucinating.
Murazik 5y ago
[flagged]
qwerty456127 5y ago
> One point on which you both clearly agree is that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon, It probably is but I wouldn't be so sure it is. I have neither a feeling nor a rationally logical proof of this idea. It's just an intuitive guess. > we have the ineffable experience of being alive in this world The experience of being, and the experience of attributes like "alive" and in "somewhere in particular" are separate things. AFAIK the latter even is attributed to specific parts of the brain scientifically and it's known these can be broken. I certainly feel like "I am" but I have no idea of whether I am alive and in which world I am the first seconds after the alarm clock rings. I feel my being and also have visual perception but judgement/semantics in what I see emerges 0.5-10 seconds later.
- noduerme 5y ago
  Well, being on delay doesn't detract from consciousness. Think of it this way: No matter how incredibly fast a monstrous AI ever becomes, it will always suffer some delay. >> in which world I am the first seconds after the alarm clock rings. Do you actually believe those are real, other worlds? I'm tempted to, sometimes. But if they are, it's more an argument that consciousness is real and something even grander than we acknowledge, if it can flip states and universes like that.
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    > Do you actually believe those are real, other worlds? Logically this depends of how do you define a world. Even if you imagine them as parallel universes with physics similar or mindboggingly dissimilar to that of our world, you can still say there is just one world in which all these sub-worlds exist. So, talking seriously I wouldn't say there are other worlds or there are not. I would just say "observable world" and assume there are many things beyond what we can comprehend or imagine. Even if we agree, just for the sake of argument, that the very consciousness itself is not a product of the material brain, our abilities to perceive, memorize and reason surely are and this way have limitations. Believing these limitations don't render us futile in trying to understand all the phenomena of existing universe and their nature seems absurdly naïve to me. Practically I just mean I have no idea (or even question) about the world or anything the moment I wake up. As soon as I wake up I feel like "I am" but not "I am in this world". The idea of where I am comes after a variable non-zero delay.
qualudeheart 5y ago
I don’t think we understand how the brain implements computation well enough yet. We won’t solve how the mind works untill then.
lisper 5y ago
> If you are feeling pain, for example, this gives you very actionable knowledge about what you should do next in order to survive. This seems exactly backwards to me. The visceral sensation of pain exists precisely in order to bypass your conscious decision-making. When you're hurting, your body doesn't want you to start weighing the pros and cons of various courses of action, it wants you to deal with the injury right now. That is the reason that pain feels very different -- much more urgent and harder to ignore -- than (say) getting a text message informing you that you have been hurt.
- Sosh101 5y ago
  I agree with you. But it seems that pain probably existed before higher reasoning (since it's a associated with the older parts of the brain), so it's a bit of a puzzle. Maybe early on the pain mechanisms existed without the associated qualia, or maybe pain also forces other control systems to be bypassed.
  - aeternum 5y ago
    An imperfect but generally good model of the brain is the basic/reptilian portion still in control by default, but with the higher reasoning able to act as an override. This is why it takes effort to do something like ignore pain, say no to candy bars, etc.
- asveikau 5y ago
  I've read some things suggesting that nonphysical pain can be registered in the brain similar to physical pain. A text message can certainly impact you in a similar way. Just as an example... Imagine somebody with PTSD. Let's say they get a text message that suggests to them, even indirectly, that their trauma is about to repeat. They may feel pretty intense physical danger and an urgency to intervene that makes no logical sense.
- alecst 5y ago
  Sounds like you're in agreement then? I don't see how it's backwards. The quoted text says nothing about decision-making or weighing pros and cons.
deleted 5y ago
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nathias 5y ago
the hard problem of consciousness is just an symptom of logical positivism, which is false in its entirety
hibernator149 5y ago
My pet theory is that people who think that consciousness is not a hard problem are P-Zombies that can't experience the problem. On a more serious note, as a materialist, I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. It's like I have this nice theory of everything, but it fails when I try to apply it to myself. Reminds me of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
- psyc 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure I've written this exact comment before. I'd have so much more respect for philosophers who simply admit that nobody has made any progress on the hard problem (other than increased clarity on what it is) than those who dismiss, minimize, or otherwise pooh-pooh the hard problem. The fact that the problem is "unproductive" is not a problem with the hard problem, it's only a problem for philosophers' career advancement.
- sebastianconcpt 5y ago
  Had you ever experienced an OBE? PS: I like your P-Zombie joke :D
- ganzuul 5y ago
  Qualia may be operating on a different system of reasoning. I have always wondered why new qualia felt so familiar like there was nothing new to learn, but if time is as illusory as every theory says it is then it makes more sense. To answer the hard part.... To be completely honest, I think qualia are dualistic emanations of the One Source of Truth and understanding, and describable as convex optimizations in the kinds of spaces that Incompleteness deals with. I think love and honor are hyperparameters for the hypercomputers that we refer to as our hearts and that simulation is much more likely than material because of dichotomy / reality gap.
- abernard1 5y ago
  > I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. I can respect this, but I think you have much bigger problems than consciousness if you're a materialist. Current natural philosophy and physics is far from anything resembling a materialistic worldview. Where we are right now in both QM and GR can best be described as a highly precise description of what happens, but at the expense of forcibly ignoring the essence of what constitutes material reality. In the case of QM, the "just run the equations" view of the world has been dominant since Einstein reluctantly ceded ground on this issue. To put a finer point on it, unless physicists can provide a materialistic explanation for entanglement or wavefunction collapse, we're still very much in an ethereal, immaterial world. (fwiw, I am something of a materialist, which is why I have thought of this problem beforehand.)
Atlas667 5y ago
I believe people with psychedelic experiences can attest to the controlled hallucination theory of consciousness. But only those with a materialist world view while idealists may posit souls or alternate realities. Imagination is also a part in probabilistic decision making, an unhinged prediction machine.
- agent008t 5y ago
  The fact that we experience what is being fed to 'us' by the various hardware devices, and not reality itself, is not controversial. The question is, what is the nature of the 'experiencer'?
  - Atlas667 5y ago
    See lobotomies and brain damage. See eye and nerve damage. See people with syndromes or developmental disorders. The experiencer is the sum of your body's processes. It's what it feels like to be your body. To be connected to all your parts. To have been raised and taught to react, to have instincts and decision making circuits based on these. It's a material thing. Vision is the sense of eye, thought is the speculative sense of sensing, etc.
    - agent008t 5y ago
      You are describing the experience, not the experiencer. The experience is indeed the sum of your body's processes.
zubspace 5y ago
What I find fascinating about consciousness is that it seems to be bound to your location. But how and why? Why are you inside of your body and not in someone elses? The article poses this question, but leaves it unanswered. For me it begs the question: If conscousness is bound to a location, is it possible to transfer consciousness from one entity to another? Is there some kind of thing we did not yet detect? What happens when you die or someone is born? Or maybe, we all (humans, animals and things) share a single consciousness and for each Planck time duration switch through all of them without knowing? I love to think about stuff like this, but are those questions even answerable?
- krapp 5y ago
  This is only fascinating if you refuse to accept a non-supernatural or non-metaphysical definition of consciousness. Otherwise, most of these questions become trivial when consciousness is considered as a physical, biological process bound to the brain. Why is consciousness bound to a person's location? Because their brain is bound inside their skull. Why are you inside your body and not someone else's? Because your brain is inside your body and not someone else's. Is it possible to transfer consciousness from one entity to another? transfer, no, because consciousness is inextricably linked to the brain. There's no separation between the hardware and the "software." What happens when you die or someone is born? Nothing. No afterlife, to karma, no reincarnation, no bardo, nothing. And finally, are those questions even answerable? Yes, I believe they are, but many people are uncomfortable with the ramifications of the answer as best supported by available evidence - we are purely physical beings existing within a purely physical universe. Despite all of the evidence from biology, neurology, chemistry, physics, etc. failing to show any credible evidence of a supernatural or non-biological component of consciousness apart from the brain, many people keep hoping someone will discover the soul someday and be free of the prison of material reality.
  - zubspace 5y ago
    I can completely follow your logic. And I completely agree that going supernatural or decending into a soul-debate is not constructive. That was not my intent. Still, you and I can probably agree to some extent, that there is an inner eye inside of our heads looking outside. It also makes sense to me, that those processes could spawn from a feedback loop inside of a brain. Still. why did this inner eye spawn in this head we are in? There are 8 billion heads, why this one? I'm not arguing for a soul or something. But I find it intruiging, that there had to be a mechanism which made your inner eye spawn at the place, where it now is. Only, what mechanism? Can it be explained physically? In my opinion it has to be, but maybe we missed it up to now
pasabagi 5y ago
One troubling analogy would be occasionalism. Occasionalists believe that in order for cause and effect to work, God has to intercede. This rather elegantly deals with a whole load of theoretical problems around causal realism. If you were an occasionalist, you might think, if such a thing as a 'god-of-the-gaps' exist, it should be possible to build a device that mimics its powers, a 'god machine'. Such a device would be very useful. Except, if occasionalism is wrong, and the universe simply doesn't work like that, it's obviously going to be totally impossible to build a machine that replicates the effect, or to understand how the effect could function. What if consciousness is just another 'god-of-the-gaps', and we can't replicate it or understand it, because it's fundamentally a nonsensical concept?
- yetihehe 5y ago
  > If you were an occasionalist, you might think, if such a thing as a 'god-of-the-gaps' exist, it should be possible to build a device that mimics its powers, a 'god machine'. Then that occasionalist god might interfere and break your machine and maybe break you too for trying to emulate a god.
- randallsquared 5y ago
  This is Dan Dennett's "illusion of consciousness".
  - deleted 5y ago
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- davidhs 5y ago
  What if we have the misconception of thinking we are a physical person in a physical world that has access to a weird mind? What if instead they physical brain is simulating the universe we find ourselves individually in, and we are only simulated, and we infer a physical world. You can at least scientifically model and test this.
willis936 5y ago
If you really want the answer then you need to be prepared to face some tough truths. There is no magic. Consciousness is an illusion. It's an emergent behavior from an incredibly complex neural automata.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  And in this complexity lies incredible beauty
- misja111 5y ago
  This. There's nothing magic about consciousness, and if you think it is, it's because your brains are hardwired to be convinced that you're special. But we're not. In the article, this is said very well: > Would you say that these more complicated states of emotion represent higher or more complex “levels” of consciousness? > Seth: I’m personally very skeptical of this kind of labeling, of higher and lower levels of consciousness. There is a little truth to it, of course. Unless we can agree that human beings are in some sense, more conscious than, say, an ant, we’re missing some very important things about the nature of consciousness.
- bekantan 5y ago
  Honest question: following this argument, is it to be expected that a sufficiently complex water pipeline can become conscious?
  - bondarchuk 5y ago
    Of course. This is table stakes and has been since the early 1700's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%27s_gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%27s_gap
- toshk 5y ago
  From one of the dominant theories of a material view indeed an emergent behavior from an incredibly complex neural automata. But from our daily experiences actually reality is an emergent property from our consciousness (or awareness). What we do feel, smell, hear, forms into concept, meaning, experiences forms our "reality". There might be a theoretical other "reality" or it might be a bit different many think it is now, but it doesn't make it more or less real, in the sense of actual experience it's less real.
fn1 5y ago
Why is consciousness always assumed to be a constant? Why not rather call it introspection? If you zone out, are you still conscious? Or if you are watching a movie and not thinking about yourself, are you still conscious?
jokoon 5y ago
Sometimes it seems wordd don't have good definitions, at least when they can be challenged by science. Language is mostly usage. For example we don't have a good definition of what intelligence is, on the scientific level. It might be the same thing for consciousness. We only understand intelligence or consciousness as what we see as a soul or ghost, but nothing much.
ed-209 5y ago
Theorizing about the nature of consciousness without having been subjected to it's multitude of altered states is an obvious waste of time. If you can't or won't venture into the "field", then at least have the humility to address the aggregate experiential data of those who have.
- bondarchuk 5y ago
  The trouble is that the sort of drug-induced insight (or pseudo-insight as some would call it) you refer to is usually accompanied by strong euphoric effects, which impairs your ability to dryly reason about those experiences even a long time after the fact. Nor can I completely shake the impression that those who believe a e.g. a DMT trip offers genuine insight into the nature of consciousness simply had an insufficient grasp of the subject beforehand.
  - felix318 5y ago
    There are altered states of consciousness that occur naturally and don't lead to a sense of euphoria. Sleep paralysis for example. It happened to me once and it made me see things differently, nothing religious or mystical, just an enhanced perspective. To give an example, during my episode I had what is usually described as an out-of-body experience. I felt myself walking around my bedroom as if I were awake, only to find out that my body never left the bed. Now if the sense of being "out of the body" is an illusion, how can we be sure that being "in the body" is not just the same illusion? (I'm tempted to think we are not anywhere and that space itself is the illusion, but that is beside the point)
    - bondarchuk 5y ago
      One can easily arrive at the same insight (i.e. being in the body is just an illusion) without actually experiencing it. Of course, if you have such an experience and you get knowledge or inspiration from it, so much the better. But to say that theorizing about consciousness is a waste of time if you haven't experienced altered states is myopic. (sleep paralysis is a good example though)
Bolkan 5y ago
I am become chromebook.
throwawayguy7 5y ago
What this article and most others lack is an adult treatment of why serious neuroscientists and philosphers of the mind feel the problem is in fact, hard. To me, the fact that illusion and hallucination are being invoked is strong evidence of handwaving being engaged in to dismiss an otherwise difficult problem. This is not a scientifically rigorous explanation and it doesn't take the other side seriously. As a younger guy, I read Dennet and mistook him for a serious thinker. Then I read his rebuttals of his opponents and all he did was accuse them of 'residual christianity' and make profane acrostic poems. These guys just aren't taking the other side seriously and it's kinda silly honestly.
- deleted 5y ago
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- tablespoon 5y ago
  > To me, the fact that illusion and hallucination are being invoked is strong evidence of handwaving being engaged in to dismiss an otherwise difficult problem. This is not a scientifically rigorous explanation and it doesn't take the other side seriously. Yeah. IIRC, some people say the passage of time is an illusion too. It's pretty hard for me to take seriously anyone who defends their favored theory or interpretation by hand-waving away contrary but fundamental observations as illusions.
  - visarga 5y ago
    > some people say the passage of time is an illusion too Well, as the article says, the brain makes top-down predictions about our future. So the experience of time is a controlled illusion updated frequently with sense data.
    - throwawayguy7 5y ago
      I find the illusion explanation for complex phenomena unhelpful. At best, this is doing nothing to actually explain - it has no value. 'Well yes, consciousness is difficult to understand because of an error in our reasoning' . It's almost circular reasoning ... you're explaining mental phenomena with mental phenomena.
ca98am79 5y ago
I think it is impossible to understand Consciousness because Consciousness creates the brain and the whole universe. If you think of Consciousness as the thing that is first and which creates all the rest, it answers a lot of hard questions - questions like why is it so hard to even define Consciousness? Or weird paradoxes in QM. Or things like: why do we all share the present moment? Once you start to see Consciousness as the foundation of everything, it all makes a lot more sense. Everything fits together much more easily. A lot of religions have also come to this conclusion. There is a book called Biocentrism by Robert Lanza, which I thought was really good and went into details about this.
- stevofolife 5y ago
  Replace the word “Consciousness” with “God” and it will equally make sense.
- davidhs 5y ago
  > I think it is impossible to understand Consciousness because Consciousness creates the brain and the whole universe. I think it's much more likely that consciousness is a result of brain activity. For example, if consciousness creates the brain and the whole universe, why don't I have any reliable access to what is going on except partially in my immediate vicinity? Also, how can it create such a wonderfully consistent world out there and I can not reliably drive to store because my mind is preoccupied and the rest of me goes on autopilot. I think you would require fewer bits to explain it the other way around.
FailMore 5y ago
How does everyone find the interview format of the article? I am building a platform for online interviews (https://taaalk.co/ https://taaalk.co/) so am curious to know your experience of reading discussions vs. reading an article.
ccbccccbbcccbb 5y ago
> What’s So Hard About Understanding Consciousness? It's the same kind of hard that stands in the way of programs debugging themselves.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
Like Dennett in "Consciousness Explained", both of these authors seem almost entirely focused on what we are conscious of rather than the fact that we are conscious of anything at all. Their descriptions of their work are all centered on the question of what it is that we actually experience. This is is a fascinating question, and entirely worthy of investigation. But it is not the same question as: how is it possible that we have any experience at all?
- cscurmudgeon 5y ago
  Well said. There is another harder problem of consciousness: A lot of people miss the point of the hard problem of consciousness.
  - plutonorm 5y ago
    I think it's a good test of how conscious a person is. The way we are taught to understand the world - through the scientific process - leads to the conclusion that consciousness is either an illusion or emergent. It is only through direct inspection of one's own internal experience that it becomes apparent consciousness is not an illusion. Therefore those who claim consciousness is an illusion are not in fact conscious. Those who say it is emergent are perhaps conscious but have not looked carefully enough to understand that consciousness is an entirely different category of thing to physical reality. The problem here is that science as a system of thought operates in a kind of space separate from the space of conscious experience. The intelligence born of that scientific process which is a kind of entity that exists in it's own right - is not itself conscious and hence cannot introspect correctly about consciousness. So when a person is operating in the mode of scientific thinking they are in a sense embodying that disembodied intelligence that is not aware. Or at least it is not able to introspect about it's own awareness. And so they draw incorrect and non-sensical conclusions that fly in the face of everyone's direct visceral experience. It really is quite a phenomena.
- beardedetim 5y ago
  I think they're two sides of the same coin. _How_ do we have any experience will be more easily answered the more we know about _what_ we actually experience. And _what_ we experience is predicated upon _how_ we experience it. I agree both need investigating. The _bigger_ question I see the coin representing is _who or what_ is experiencing in the first place? The way I see it, it's not really _a thing_ experiencing _something_ but instead _things_ experiencing _things_ at _times_.
yboris 5y ago
My favorite read on this topic is Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett He's a philosopher who has spent a lifetime thinking about this problem, informed by the latest science of the day. Plus he's an excellent, lucid writer. He is a materialist, optimistic about being able to have as-satisfactory of an explanation of consciousness in the future as we do for life (no "élan vital" needed). https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Dennett/dp/0316180661 https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Denn...
- Sosh101 5y ago
  Or as some like to call it Consciousness Denied :)
hsnewman 5y ago
I've been studying consciousness recently, specifically the question of how physics can explain it. It turns out there is a Strong Emergence theory, which physics shows only consciousness as proof. I find it a fascinating theory. It is strong emergence if "The whole is other than the sum of its parts."
- ncmncm 5y ago
  I.e., "The speed is other than the sum of the car parts." There is nothing there.
  - hsnewman 5y ago
    That would be weak emergence.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      It's table stakes. If you can't process that, you are guaranteed to understand no more.
xpuente 5y ago
The right analogy is trying to understand why your favorite OS works, by trying to understand why certain window appears when you click in certain region of the screen. You need to understand up to certain level the underlying mechanisms (e.g. if you want to understand how an OS works, you need how a syscall works, then you need to understand how the processor works). All this philosophical labyrinth of words seems futile. We need to have a right system level model of the cortex and subcortical structures to progress. I feel like we are trying to resolve this problem looking at the quantum effects in the transistors (using the previously cited analogy) [neuroscience] and looking to a datacenter [cognitive science]. We need to choose the right level of abstraction. We haven't figured out what is the right one in the last 100 year. We will do... and perhaps discover that Cortico-thalamic pathway in the von Neumman base of our OS...
snikeris 5y ago
What are some evolutionary explanations for consciousness? What does the organism gain by expending energy to make its experiences conscious?
ncmncm 5y ago
That was surprisingly not complete bollocks. Bollocks is the norm when anybody talks about the "problem of consciousness'. There are legitimate questions to ask about consciousness, but nobody asks them. How does the perception of being conscious aid in survival and/or reproduction? It's kind of like wondering about what good being beautiful does for a blind, microscopic worm: not necessarily answerable, but anyway worth asking.
Dangeranger 5y ago
My completely uneducated opinion on this, is that our consciousness is an emergent property of our subconscious, and that our subconscious is an emergent property of the physics of our brain’s electrical signals. This opinion is almost certainly wrong, but it’s helped me while thinking about my own mind and experiences.
mrkramer 5y ago
Consciousness is byproduct of high intelligence and result of evolution. As your intelligence increases generation over generation it is evolutionary "logical" to be conscious and aware to increase your survival rate.
miika 5y ago
Who thinks it’s hard? When you have answer to that then you understand consciousness.
Osiris 5y ago
I do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and a common submission technique is to cut off blood flow to the brain (known as a blood choke). I've lost consciousness twice after being put into a blood choke. The experience of regaining consciousness is visceral. For those that haven't experienced it, it's very much like a turning on a computer. Initially, your brain does not (or cannot) process input like vision, sound, touch, etc. Slowly, over about 30-60 seconds, you begin to see and hear but they don't make any sense. You've completely lost the context of who and where you are. Then you begin to recognize colors and shapes, sounds of voices, etc. Eventually, you see and hear everything but still haven't built a concept of the context. Lastly, your brain seems to begin making sense of all the inputs and you regain full conscious awareness. If you think it's just like waking up from a dream or from a nap, you're wrong. It's a completely different experience, one that's so profound that I distinctly remember the entire episode even years later (and I have poor memory recall generally).
- nh23423fefe 5y ago
  That sounds like a slow motion version of waking from anesthesia. Waking from sleep feels very fast, but I've been put under for surgery more than once now, and coming around from surgery doesn't feel like waking up. It feels like something else completely.
- bigcat123 5y ago
- bitexploder 5y ago
  I slept once on the mats. I literally remember feeling like I was in a fuzzy and comfortable dream and waking up to my partner shaking me and asking if I am alright. I blurted out something like "What are we doing?" and I was wondering why my partner was sitting next to me and where I was and what was going on. But not in a panicked or concerned way. Like some parts of my brain knew what was happening. But the thinking me was trying to put together all the sub-conscious streams again and get them routed correctly. Turns out his cross collar choke was tighter than I thought. It was not unpleasant and I had a mild buzzy/headache-y feel for the rest of the day. It all felt a little dreamy and is one of the strongest memories I have had in recent years. Definitely something I remember clearly. Also: if anyone is in the Denver area we have mats at our office :)
hardlianotion 5y ago
Probably the lack of an appropriate viewpoint to analyse it from.
pandoro 5y ago
Consciousness cannot be understood or known in the epistemological sense of the term since it is, by definition, the ultimate subject. It also cannot be experienced as an object. It sounds very hand-wavy and esoteric but if you think hard about it, it is absolutely and undeniably the only tenable logical position. Put in another way: if you somehow claim to be able to observe or measure consciousness as an object, then what is it that is doing the observing? Similarly, consciousness is unchanging and without beginning or end, for noticing and knowing any change you need consciousness.
Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
From how I see it, understanding consciousness is impossible because it's difficult to define and even harder to explain. Go back a couple billion years before we had life on Earth. There was no life until abiogenesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis) occurred. Somehow, over the course of a couple billion years, self-replicating molecules turns into single-celled life, then multicellular life, and eventually the complex lifeforms we see today. But...that still doesn't explain consciousness. To an external observer, a brain is just a very complex set of electrical and chemical reactions. But to that person, there's a consciousness behind it all. But that consciousness can be altered by drugs and physical injury. It calls into question if anybody actually truly has free will, or if a sufficiently advanced computer could perfectly simulate exactly how a person would react to anything given a perfect snapshot of the wiring of their neurons and states of synapses. I don't know how to define consciousness in a way that couldn't also be applied to a sufficiently advanced AI/AGI.
- tasty_freeze 5y ago
  > understanding consciousness is impossible because it's difficult to define and even harder to explain. For sure there isn't one agreed upon definition of consciousness. On the odd occasion I get in a discussion about it, the first thing I say is: what is your definition of consciousness. I think given a definition of consciousness, it can be discussed and progress can be made explaining that particular definition. But if the two parties don't agree to a definition up front, then it is likely to result in a trainwreck.
- jstanley 5y ago
  > if a sufficiently advanced computer could perfectly simulate exactly how a person would react to anything given a perfect snapshot of the wiring of their neurons and states of synapses. And if so, would that simulation still create the subjective experience? Or would it act exactly the same as the real person except the subjective experience never occurs?
CallidusAsinus 5y ago
In my experience, when reading about consciousness there are a couple types of claims you should be cautious of: 1) Claims that the causes of consciousness can be easily explained. As far as I can tell, they can't. Usually these explanations use the word "emergent" a lot, and tend to be linguistically impenetrable. Often more poetic than scientific when scrutinized closely. 2) Claims that consciousness doesn't exist. These arguments often feel like semantic nitpicking, and employ the word "illusion" as though it's somehow useful for explaining why you experience. My pet criteria for whether a statement about consciousness is useful is: "Can this possibly help explain how I can merge consciousness with someone (or something) else?" To me, this feels like a tangible measurement for how materially useful a claim about consciousness might be. An example is literature on "Split-Brain" patients (such as https://www.nature.com/articles/483260a https://www.nature.com/articles/483260a). edit: Another category to be wary of is: 3) Claims that we cannot understand consciousness. Usually these boil down to "how can consciousness understand itself?". Poetic and poignant, but not particularly useful or scientifically grounded.
- contravariant 5y ago
  I suppose if consciousness is indeed an illusion then that would at least explain why it's so hard to understand. Or rather it may not be that it's hard to understand but understanding an illusion usually means dispelling it, which is problematic when that illusion is consciousness. Then again claiming something is an illusion is usually less than helpful. Colour is an illusion of sorts (or a qualia if we're being technical), but 'colour is an illusion' is an unhelpful answer to the question 'why is the sky blue?'.
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  - p_noumenon 5y ago
    Consciousness is literally the only thing which can't be an illusion, because it's through consciousness that illusions are perceived in the first place. Cogito ergo sum; you can doubt what you are experiencing as much as you like, maybe it's a dream, maybe it's a simulation, maybe there's an evil demon deceiving you through magical means, but you can't doubt the fact that you are experiencing at all, even doubt itself is part of the experience.
ffhhj 5y ago
Sometimes when I wake up in the morning I am "conscious" of my position in the room but the position of walls, windows, the closet, etc. doesn't match, sudendly I feel like I'm instantly turned around in space! Then I realize that my belief was wrong, and it feels like I was sleeping in another orientation on the bed. Recently I bought a telescope and took some pictures of the moon. Then I searched for a map of the moon, and to my surprise the orientation didn't match my photos. I imagined myself stading on the right side of the planet, looking at the moon which was also at the right. I realized that my "up" is actually the "side", and my photos and the map made sense. That was like the reorientation feeling, but softer. That made me think whether one thing is having a theory of this world, and another very different when a theory is deep in our consciousness.
m3kw9 5y ago
What’s more amazing is why a person is selected as your consciousness?
colordrops 5y ago
It's hard to understand consciousness, but it's not hard to understand why it's hard to understand consciousness. The problem is we are trying to understand consciousness by using consciousness. We can't step outside of it. Just like you can't directly look at your own eyes. You can see them in a mirror, and you can infer properties of consciousness by observing external phenomena, but you can't directly experience it, because you are it (at least from a materialist viewpoint - there are spiritualist traditions that say otherwise).
- chasd00 5y ago
  I'm no philosopher but feel the same way, the most advanced technology and thinking we have still has to be processed and understood by our own consciousness. It reminds me of the brain-in-a-vat problem. If you ever discovered you were actually just a simulation then the simulation would be paused, the bug fixed, and restarted. There's only so much that can be done with the perception available to us.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
“ Consciousness is simpler than we make it. There’s no hard problem. ” Certainly the hard problem goes away when you define it to be simpler.
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2snakes 5y ago
Whew! I read the article and this entire thread. I'm not surprised that most people are materialists. But I think if you really look into the literature with OOBEs and parapsychology you will find that there are some amazing experiences that are not explained by metaphysical materialism. And you can experience this yourself with deep meditation and/or the blessings of teachers. I think the scientific method is valid for exploring these states too. True Yoga is a science of mind control. I would advise looking into Patangali's Eight-fold Path with the goal of kaivalya/Asamprajnata Samadhi/Cosmic Consciousness and the concept of prapatti (surrender to grace of the higher self and others). Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to Scientific paradigms! An interesting perspective is also found in the RBC from brainvoyage.com and a fascinating refutation of materialism is found on p.6 here: http://www.pni.org/groundbreaking/TDVPunification.pdf http://www.pni.org/groundbreaking/TDVPunification.pdf
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guerrilla 5y ago
I think this discussion is probably dead being that it's 24 hours old now but I just came across this Wittgenstein quote and felt it might be relevant and inspire some thought on this. The limits of my language stand for the limits of my world. There really is only one world soul, which I for preference call my soul and as which alone I conceive what I call the souls of others. The above remark gives the key for deciding the way in which solipsism is a truth. (Wittgenstein 1961: 49) The I makes its appearance in philosophy through the world’s being my world. (Wittgenstein 1961: 80) Here we can see that solipsism coincides with pure realism, if it is strictly thought out. The I of solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and what remains is the reality co-ordinate with it. . . . I have to judge the world, to measure things. The philosophical I is not the human being, not the human body or the human soul with the psychological properties, but the metaphysical subject, the boundary (not a part) of the world. (Wittgenstein 1961: 82) This is the way I have travelled: Idealism singles men out from the world as unique, solipsism singles me alone out, and at last I see that I too belong with the rest of the world, and so on the one side nothing is left over, and on the other side, as unique, the world. In this way idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out. (Wittgenstein 1961: 85)

Thanks for the link. I agree with Seth that consciousness is much like a controlled hallucination - after all, we don't experience reality directly, but through the predictions of our brain. But then the question is, why do you need this hallucination? I suspect that consciousness evolved because it makes an organism more capable than one who doesn't. But what does consciousness offer over just taking in sensory input and making predictions without having qualia (much like a computer does)?

wruza 5y ago
Is it the fact that a computer doesn’t have one of a sort?
FeepingCreature 5y ago
I think the important part is that you can represent more things in consciousness than just "five-sense data", ie. exotic sense data like emotions, reactions, imagination, memory, impulses, selfhood, and correlate them with the ordinary sensory data. A non-conscious animal may see a predator and get scared, but I don't know if it knows that it's scared because of the predator. I think you need an integrated space for both direct data and metadata for that. Also, in humans, I'd presume that consciousness, being introspectable, relates to our ability to understand our own interests and behaviors, and those of others, in symbolic terms and express them with language. It's how we close the circle between thinking and "I think". (I agree with the article that people vastly overestimate the mystery of consciousness.) PS: I think consciousness being introspectable is very underrated. We can perceive memories of perception, we can feel nostalgic for having felt a certain way in the past, and we can realize and name that we are doing this. The "reentrancy" of consciousness is a core aspect of our cognitive and strategic flexibility.
- tremon 5y ago
  A non-conscious animal may see a predator and get scared This is maybe just a matter of definition, but I find it highly unlikely that that scenario exists. "Seeing" a predator already requires so much higher-level processing (not just the visual cues, but the analysis and classification) that I find it unlikely the animal does not have a working distinction between intra-body and outside-world sensations. The problem with defining "consciousness" is that we do not have reliable inter-species communication to compare notes between species, so our definition of consciousness itself is hampered by the ability to communicate that sense of consciousness to each other. Already in your post, there's seven different interpretations of what "consciousness" could actually mean: - ability to recall past experiences ("emotions", "memory") - awareness of the self ("impulses", "selfhood") - ability to conceive experiences that do not correspond with sensory inputs ("imagination") - meta-awareness of instinctual reactions ("if it knows that it's scared because of the predator") - introspection ("our ability to understand our own interests and behaviors") - empathy ("and those of others") - communicating our sense of self to others ("express them with language") Personally, I think we should assume that all animal species possess the first four, all large mammals can do the first five, and many species have the ability to do the sixth (it's been proven in dogs, apes, parrots, crows, and dolphins -- and probably others).
  - mrkramer 5y ago
    All the things you mentioned are products of evolution invented for the purpose of increasing survival rate. For example emotions serve us mammals to bond with each other, bring us closer together so that we help each other in order to survive.
Sosh101 5y ago
The hallucination analogy is useful I think in some ways, in that it could allow access to a view of reality that has important parts represented in a meaningful way. But, surely a hallucination requires an underlying consciousness to experience it? So for me it's not very useful in explaining the phenonmenon of consciousness itself. It seems that it's not far removed from the old "theatre" analogy, which requires an unexplained "homunculus" (and probably homunculi ad infinitum).
Aardwolf 5y ago
Explanations like "consciousness is a controlled hallucination" or "consciousness is just an illusion" don't answer anything for me. To be able to have a hallucination or an illusion, you still need the consciousness experiencing that. Explain that consciousness. > I suspect that consciousness evolved because it makes an organism more capable than one who doesn't. You can't prove consciousness from behavior (afaik), and it's behavior that makes organisms more capable
- grumbel 5y ago
  > "consciousness is just an illusion" Replace "illusion" with "perception" and it will make a lot more sense. Consciousness does obviously exist in one form or another, but when people think intuitively about consciousness they imagine it as an actor. A little guy in your head that looks at the world and makes decisions. That's the illusion. That "little guy", that "self", isn't the one doing the work, your brain is the one doing the work. The little guy is a how the brain tries to make sens of itself. Just like photons hitting your eyeballs might be interpreted as cats and dogs out there in the world, the brain interprets or perceives whatever it is doing internally as a "self". > You can't prove consciousness from behavior (afaik) Without some sens of self any creature would have a pretty difficult time surviving, as it wouldn't be able to tell itself apart from the rest of the world.
  - Aardwolf 5y ago
    > The little guy is a how the brain tries to make sens of itself. That still doesn't explain consciousness itself. Though I think there are many different interpretations and definitions for the word consciousness so we might be talking about a different one. > Without some sens of self any creature would have a pretty difficult time surviving, as it wouldn't be able to tell itself apart from the rest of the world. A cell just replicates because that's what the molecules in it happen to do
    - grumbel 5y ago
      > That still doesn't explain consciousness itself. Well, which part doesn't it explain? It's pretty conclusive as far as I am concerned. As among other things, you can explain why philosophers would even ask that question in the first place. > A cell just replicates because that's what the molecules in it happen to do And transistors just go on and off, yet people still spend years studying computer science. The existence of simple mechanism at one level doesn't prevent higher order mechanism at another, quite the opposite. Those cells aren't going to do much replicating when you get killed by a tiger, some awareness of yourself and the environment helps prevent that.
ikrenji 5y ago
maybe consciousness is a side effect, an emergent phenomena. once the brain gets complicated enough it will just arise (on a scale)... also are our decisions ours? or some inner layer in us creates the decision and then we just consciously observe it / let it play out...
- watercooler_guy 5y ago
  >maybe consciousness is a side effect, an emergent phenomena. once the brain gets complicated enough it will just arise (on a scale) This is my feeling too. Since the brain is just physical matter arranged a certain way, doing a certain type of processing, I really think it possible that some computer programs we use today are also doing the right kind of processing to grant them a simple subjective inner experience. Of course most programs don’t have a way to tell us if that’s the case, except maybe GPT-3 :) > are our decisions ours? or some inner layer in us creates the decision and then we just consciously observe it / let it play out I have evidence for it being the latter: our higher brain functions let us rationalize, to ourselves, the decisions that were deterministically made by our subconscious, so it feels like “you” made the decisions “because you wanted to”. People who have the connection between their brain hemispheres severed can unconsciously reach a decision in one hemisphere, but then consciously rationalize it in the other hemisphere, without having experienced the making of the decision [0]: >In one example of this kind of test, a picture of a chicken claw was flashed to the left hemisphere and a picture of a snow scene to the right hemisphere. Of the array of pictures placed in front of the subject, the obviously correct association is a chicken for the chicken claw and a shovel for the snow scene. Patient P.S. responded by choosing the shovel with the left hand and the chicken with the right. When asked why he chose these items, his left hemisphere replied `Oh, that's simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed'. Here the left brain, observing the left hand's response, interprets that response in a context consistent with its sphere of knowledge—one that does not include information about the left hemifield snow scene. [0] https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/123/7/1293/380106 https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/123/7/1293/380106
raducu 5y ago
We obviously don't have the full picture about sensations -- they might be a side effect of specialized (biochemical) neural architectures, but more likely there is something intrinsic to them that grants advantages to sensations. There's something to making things really "personal" to an individual system having sensations that make it act in its best interest. Sensations are also very flexible biochemical abstractions and solutions to problems across aeons. It would have been quite hard for organisms to evolve without such abstractions -- like a worm recoiling in pain and a human quickly rettacting his burnt hand or avoiding certain kinds of people who have hurt him before.
tgv 5y ago
> we don't experience reality directly That muddies the water, IMO. We do experience reality directly: our nerve endings do. The next step is processing, which is somewhat mediated by low-level expectations. This takes place at sub-conscious levels. Conscious perception comes much later, and is obviously more filtered. To call it a hallucination is word play.
- pwm 5y ago
  > We do experience reality directly: our nerve endings do. Depending on how you define "reality" we only experience a tiny subset of it. We can only see/hear/touch/smell/taste a very restricted universe, only what our "antennas" can detect. In fact I would argue that we experience close to 0% of all of reality. On top of this extremely restricted input our processing of it is imperfect which means some of what we experience has nothing to do with reality.
  - tgv 5y ago
    Restricted as it may be, we experience reality. Experiencing reality completely is impossible anyway. And in the context of hallucination, what we can't experience doesn't matter.
    - pwm 5y ago
      Sure, I don't disagree but (to me anyway) it's important to point out the difference between reality vs. our potential intake from it. The blind men and the elephant parable applies.
- ThrustVectoring 5y ago
  There are fixed patterns in still images that appear to move when we perceive them. "We don't experience reality directly" and calling it a hallucination seems apt - the thing we experience when we look at things is less "what's actually there" and more "the best guess our brain can construct about what's there". Additional examples of this include the non-perception of the visual blind spot, how the brain fills in details in the middle of saccades, and how task-specific training causes perceptual differences (eg, thrown baseballs look bigger to professional batters).
noiv 5y ago
I think the most simple explanation is the brain runs a simulation of its environment and at some point after birth it puts its human into this simulation. That's probably when children start using the word 'I' and raise a consciousness.
davidhs 5y ago
I think what you mean by reality is physical reality, if so then it is impossible for us to directly experience it. You are a simulated being in a simulated world. The simulated world runs on a physical brain. Everything you experience is "hallucinations," but if your physical brain works normally then they will be constrained to explain the input to the brain. Consciousness is most likely a property or set of properties of this simulation. Some part of your brain make predictive models of its input, and the things that it models is yourself, your current environment, other stuff going on (the mind), how these things relate to each other and such. My guess is that qualia is something like primitives to this simulated world.
50 5y ago
Had this thought recently: The function of psychedelics is not to induce hallucinations, but to help you recognize that you’re always already hallucinating.

Murazik 5y ago

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qwerty456127 5y ago

> One point on which you both clearly agree is that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon, It probably is but I wouldn't be so sure it is. I have neither a feeling nor a rationally logical proof of this idea. It's just an intuitive guess. > we have the ineffable experience of being alive in this world The experience of being, and the experience of attributes like "alive" and in "somewhere in particular" are separate things. AFAIK the latter even is attributed to specific parts of the brain scientifically and it's known these can be broken. I certainly feel like "I am" but I have no idea of whether I am alive and in which world I am the first seconds after the alarm clock rings. I feel my being and also have visual perception but judgement/semantics in what I see emerges 0.5-10 seconds later.

noduerme 5y ago
Well, being on delay doesn't detract from consciousness. Think of it this way: No matter how incredibly fast a monstrous AI ever becomes, it will always suffer some delay. >> in which world I am the first seconds after the alarm clock rings. Do you actually believe those are real, other worlds? I'm tempted to, sometimes. But if they are, it's more an argument that consciousness is real and something even grander than we acknowledge, if it can flip states and universes like that.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  > Do you actually believe those are real, other worlds? Logically this depends of how do you define a world. Even if you imagine them as parallel universes with physics similar or mindboggingly dissimilar to that of our world, you can still say there is just one world in which all these sub-worlds exist. So, talking seriously I wouldn't say there are other worlds or there are not. I would just say "observable world" and assume there are many things beyond what we can comprehend or imagine. Even if we agree, just for the sake of argument, that the very consciousness itself is not a product of the material brain, our abilities to perceive, memorize and reason surely are and this way have limitations. Believing these limitations don't render us futile in trying to understand all the phenomena of existing universe and their nature seems absurdly naïve to me. Practically I just mean I have no idea (or even question) about the world or anything the moment I wake up. As soon as I wake up I feel like "I am" but not "I am in this world". The idea of where I am comes after a variable non-zero delay.

qualudeheart 5y ago

I don’t think we understand how the brain implements computation well enough yet. We won’t solve how the mind works untill then.

lisper 5y ago

> If you are feeling pain, for example, this gives you very actionable knowledge about what you should do next in order to survive. This seems exactly backwards to me. The visceral sensation of pain exists precisely in order to bypass your conscious decision-making. When you're hurting, your body doesn't want you to start weighing the pros and cons of various courses of action, it wants you to deal with the injury right now. That is the reason that pain feels very different -- much more urgent and harder to ignore -- than (say) getting a text message informing you that you have been hurt.

Sosh101 5y ago
I agree with you. But it seems that pain probably existed before higher reasoning (since it's a associated with the older parts of the brain), so it's a bit of a puzzle. Maybe early on the pain mechanisms existed without the associated qualia, or maybe pain also forces other control systems to be bypassed.
- aeternum 5y ago
  An imperfect but generally good model of the brain is the basic/reptilian portion still in control by default, but with the higher reasoning able to act as an override. This is why it takes effort to do something like ignore pain, say no to candy bars, etc.
asveikau 5y ago
I've read some things suggesting that nonphysical pain can be registered in the brain similar to physical pain. A text message can certainly impact you in a similar way. Just as an example... Imagine somebody with PTSD. Let's say they get a text message that suggests to them, even indirectly, that their trauma is about to repeat. They may feel pretty intense physical danger and an urgency to intervene that makes no logical sense.
alecst 5y ago
Sounds like you're in agreement then? I don't see how it's backwards. The quoted text says nothing about decision-making or weighing pros and cons.

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nathias 5y ago

the hard problem of consciousness is just an symptom of logical positivism, which is false in its entirety

hibernator149 5y ago

My pet theory is that people who think that consciousness is not a hard problem are P-Zombies that can't experience the problem. On a more serious note, as a materialist, I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. It's like I have this nice theory of everything, but it fails when I try to apply it to myself. Reminds me of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

psyc 5y ago
I'm pretty sure I've written this exact comment before. I'd have so much more respect for philosophers who simply admit that nobody has made any progress on the hard problem (other than increased clarity on what it is) than those who dismiss, minimize, or otherwise pooh-pooh the hard problem. The fact that the problem is "unproductive" is not a problem with the hard problem, it's only a problem for philosophers' career advancement.
sebastianconcpt 5y ago
Had you ever experienced an OBE? PS: I like your P-Zombie joke :D
ganzuul 5y ago
Qualia may be operating on a different system of reasoning. I have always wondered why new qualia felt so familiar like there was nothing new to learn, but if time is as illusory as every theory says it is then it makes more sense. To answer the hard part.... To be completely honest, I think qualia are dualistic emanations of the One Source of Truth and understanding, and describable as convex optimizations in the kinds of spaces that Incompleteness deals with. I think love and honor are hyperparameters for the hypercomputers that we refer to as our hearts and that simulation is much more likely than material because of dichotomy / reality gap.
abernard1 5y ago
> I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. I can respect this, but I think you have much bigger problems than consciousness if you're a materialist. Current natural philosophy and physics is far from anything resembling a materialistic worldview. Where we are right now in both QM and GR can best be described as a highly precise description of what happens, but at the expense of forcibly ignoring the essence of what constitutes material reality. In the case of QM, the "just run the equations" view of the world has been dominant since Einstein reluctantly ceded ground on this issue. To put a finer point on it, unless physicists can provide a materialistic explanation for entanglement or wavefunction collapse, we're still very much in an ethereal, immaterial world. (fwiw, I am something of a materialist, which is why I have thought of this problem beforehand.)

Atlas667 5y ago

I believe people with psychedelic experiences can attest to the controlled hallucination theory of consciousness. But only those with a materialist world view while idealists may posit souls or alternate realities. Imagination is also a part in probabilistic decision making, an unhinged prediction machine.

agent008t 5y ago
The fact that we experience what is being fed to 'us' by the various hardware devices, and not reality itself, is not controversial. The question is, what is the nature of the 'experiencer'?
- Atlas667 5y ago
  See lobotomies and brain damage. See eye and nerve damage. See people with syndromes or developmental disorders. The experiencer is the sum of your body's processes. It's what it feels like to be your body. To be connected to all your parts. To have been raised and taught to react, to have instincts and decision making circuits based on these. It's a material thing. Vision is the sense of eye, thought is the speculative sense of sensing, etc.
  - agent008t 5y ago
    You are describing the experience, not the experiencer. The experience is indeed the sum of your body's processes.

zubspace 5y ago

What I find fascinating about consciousness is that it seems to be bound to your location. But how and why? Why are you inside of your body and not in someone elses? The article poses this question, but leaves it unanswered. For me it begs the question: If conscousness is bound to a location, is it possible to transfer consciousness from one entity to another? Is there some kind of thing we did not yet detect? What happens when you die or someone is born? Or maybe, we all (humans, animals and things) share a single consciousness and for each Planck time duration switch through all of them without knowing? I love to think about stuff like this, but are those questions even answerable?

krapp 5y ago
This is only fascinating if you refuse to accept a non-supernatural or non-metaphysical definition of consciousness. Otherwise, most of these questions become trivial when consciousness is considered as a physical, biological process bound to the brain. Why is consciousness bound to a person's location? Because their brain is bound inside their skull. Why are you inside your body and not someone else's? Because your brain is inside your body and not someone else's. Is it possible to transfer consciousness from one entity to another? transfer, no, because consciousness is inextricably linked to the brain. There's no separation between the hardware and the "software." What happens when you die or someone is born? Nothing. No afterlife, to karma, no reincarnation, no bardo, nothing. And finally, are those questions even answerable? Yes, I believe they are, but many people are uncomfortable with the ramifications of the answer as best supported by available evidence - we are purely physical beings existing within a purely physical universe. Despite all of the evidence from biology, neurology, chemistry, physics, etc. failing to show any credible evidence of a supernatural or non-biological component of consciousness apart from the brain, many people keep hoping someone will discover the soul someday and be free of the prison of material reality.
- zubspace 5y ago
  I can completely follow your logic. And I completely agree that going supernatural or decending into a soul-debate is not constructive. That was not my intent. Still, you and I can probably agree to some extent, that there is an inner eye inside of our heads looking outside. It also makes sense to me, that those processes could spawn from a feedback loop inside of a brain. Still. why did this inner eye spawn in this head we are in? There are 8 billion heads, why this one? I'm not arguing for a soul or something. But I find it intruiging, that there had to be a mechanism which made your inner eye spawn at the place, where it now is. Only, what mechanism? Can it be explained physically? In my opinion it has to be, but maybe we missed it up to now

pasabagi 5y ago

One troubling analogy would be occasionalism. Occasionalists believe that in order for cause and effect to work, God has to intercede. This rather elegantly deals with a whole load of theoretical problems around causal realism. If you were an occasionalist, you might think, if such a thing as a 'god-of-the-gaps' exist, it should be possible to build a device that mimics its powers, a 'god machine'. Such a device would be very useful. Except, if occasionalism is wrong, and the universe simply doesn't work like that, it's obviously going to be totally impossible to build a machine that replicates the effect, or to understand how the effect could function. What if consciousness is just another 'god-of-the-gaps', and we can't replicate it or understand it, because it's fundamentally a nonsensical concept?

yetihehe 5y ago
> If you were an occasionalist, you might think, if such a thing as a 'god-of-the-gaps' exist, it should be possible to build a device that mimics its powers, a 'god machine'. Then that occasionalist god might interfere and break your machine and maybe break you too for trying to emulate a god.
randallsquared 5y ago
This is Dan Dennett's "illusion of consciousness".
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davidhs 5y ago
What if we have the misconception of thinking we are a physical person in a physical world that has access to a weird mind? What if instead they physical brain is simulating the universe we find ourselves individually in, and we are only simulated, and we infer a physical world. You can at least scientifically model and test this.

willis936 5y ago

If you really want the answer then you need to be prepared to face some tough truths. There is no magic. Consciousness is an illusion. It's an emergent behavior from an incredibly complex neural automata.

netizen-936824 5y ago
And in this complexity lies incredible beauty
misja111 5y ago
This. There's nothing magic about consciousness, and if you think it is, it's because your brains are hardwired to be convinced that you're special. But we're not. In the article, this is said very well: > Would you say that these more complicated states of emotion represent higher or more complex “levels” of consciousness? > Seth: I’m personally very skeptical of this kind of labeling, of higher and lower levels of consciousness. There is a little truth to it, of course. Unless we can agree that human beings are in some sense, more conscious than, say, an ant, we’re missing some very important things about the nature of consciousness.
bekantan 5y ago
Honest question: following this argument, is it to be expected that a sufficiently complex water pipeline can become conscious?
- bondarchuk 5y ago
  Of course. This is table stakes and has been since the early 1700's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%27s_gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%27s_gap
toshk 5y ago
From one of the dominant theories of a material view indeed an emergent behavior from an incredibly complex neural automata. But from our daily experiences actually reality is an emergent property from our consciousness (or awareness). What we do feel, smell, hear, forms into concept, meaning, experiences forms our "reality". There might be a theoretical other "reality" or it might be a bit different many think it is now, but it doesn't make it more or less real, in the sense of actual experience it's less real.

fn1 5y ago

Why is consciousness always assumed to be a constant? Why not rather call it introspection? If you zone out, are you still conscious? Or if you are watching a movie and not thinking about yourself, are you still conscious?

jokoon 5y ago

Sometimes it seems wordd don't have good definitions, at least when they can be challenged by science. Language is mostly usage. For example we don't have a good definition of what intelligence is, on the scientific level. It might be the same thing for consciousness. We only understand intelligence or consciousness as what we see as a soul or ghost, but nothing much.

ed-209 5y ago

Theorizing about the nature of consciousness without having been subjected to it's multitude of altered states is an obvious waste of time. If you can't or won't venture into the "field", then at least have the humility to address the aggregate experiential data of those who have.

bondarchuk 5y ago
The trouble is that the sort of drug-induced insight (or pseudo-insight as some would call it) you refer to is usually accompanied by strong euphoric effects, which impairs your ability to dryly reason about those experiences even a long time after the fact. Nor can I completely shake the impression that those who believe a e.g. a DMT trip offers genuine insight into the nature of consciousness simply had an insufficient grasp of the subject beforehand.
- felix318 5y ago
  There are altered states of consciousness that occur naturally and don't lead to a sense of euphoria. Sleep paralysis for example. It happened to me once and it made me see things differently, nothing religious or mystical, just an enhanced perspective. To give an example, during my episode I had what is usually described as an out-of-body experience. I felt myself walking around my bedroom as if I were awake, only to find out that my body never left the bed. Now if the sense of being "out of the body" is an illusion, how can we be sure that being "in the body" is not just the same illusion? (I'm tempted to think we are not anywhere and that space itself is the illusion, but that is beside the point)
  - bondarchuk 5y ago
    One can easily arrive at the same insight (i.e. being in the body is just an illusion) without actually experiencing it. Of course, if you have such an experience and you get knowledge or inspiration from it, so much the better. But to say that theorizing about consciousness is a waste of time if you haven't experienced altered states is myopic. (sleep paralysis is a good example though)

Bolkan 5y ago

I am become chromebook.

throwawayguy7 5y ago

What this article and most others lack is an adult treatment of why serious neuroscientists and philosphers of the mind feel the problem is in fact, hard. To me, the fact that illusion and hallucination are being invoked is strong evidence of handwaving being engaged in to dismiss an otherwise difficult problem. This is not a scientifically rigorous explanation and it doesn't take the other side seriously. As a younger guy, I read Dennet and mistook him for a serious thinker. Then I read his rebuttals of his opponents and all he did was accuse them of 'residual christianity' and make profane acrostic poems. These guys just aren't taking the other side seriously and it's kinda silly honestly.

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tablespoon 5y ago
> To me, the fact that illusion and hallucination are being invoked is strong evidence of handwaving being engaged in to dismiss an otherwise difficult problem. This is not a scientifically rigorous explanation and it doesn't take the other side seriously. Yeah. IIRC, some people say the passage of time is an illusion too. It's pretty hard for me to take seriously anyone who defends their favored theory or interpretation by hand-waving away contrary but fundamental observations as illusions.
- visarga 5y ago
  > some people say the passage of time is an illusion too Well, as the article says, the brain makes top-down predictions about our future. So the experience of time is a controlled illusion updated frequently with sense data.
  - throwawayguy7 5y ago
    I find the illusion explanation for complex phenomena unhelpful. At best, this is doing nothing to actually explain - it has no value. 'Well yes, consciousness is difficult to understand because of an error in our reasoning' . It's almost circular reasoning ... you're explaining mental phenomena with mental phenomena.

ca98am79 5y ago

I think it is impossible to understand Consciousness because Consciousness creates the brain and the whole universe. If you think of Consciousness as the thing that is first and which creates all the rest, it answers a lot of hard questions - questions like why is it so hard to even define Consciousness? Or weird paradoxes in QM. Or things like: why do we all share the present moment? Once you start to see Consciousness as the foundation of everything, it all makes a lot more sense. Everything fits together much more easily. A lot of religions have also come to this conclusion. There is a book called Biocentrism by Robert Lanza, which I thought was really good and went into details about this.

stevofolife 5y ago
Replace the word “Consciousness” with “God” and it will equally make sense.
davidhs 5y ago
> I think it is impossible to understand Consciousness because Consciousness creates the brain and the whole universe. I think it's much more likely that consciousness is a result of brain activity. For example, if consciousness creates the brain and the whole universe, why don't I have any reliable access to what is going on except partially in my immediate vicinity? Also, how can it create such a wonderfully consistent world out there and I can not reliably drive to store because my mind is preoccupied and the rest of me goes on autopilot. I think you would require fewer bits to explain it the other way around.

FailMore 5y ago

How does everyone find the interview format of the article? I am building a platform for online interviews (https://taaalk.co/ https://taaalk.co/) so am curious to know your experience of reading discussions vs. reading an article.

ccbccccbbcccbb 5y ago

> What’s So Hard About Understanding Consciousness? It's the same kind of hard that stands in the way of programs debugging themselves.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

Like Dennett in "Consciousness Explained", both of these authors seem almost entirely focused on what we are conscious of rather than the fact that we are conscious of anything at all. Their descriptions of their work are all centered on the question of what it is that we actually experience. This is is a fascinating question, and entirely worthy of investigation. But it is not the same question as: how is it possible that we have any experience at all?

cscurmudgeon 5y ago
Well said. There is another harder problem of consciousness: A lot of people miss the point of the hard problem of consciousness.
- plutonorm 5y ago
  I think it's a good test of how conscious a person is. The way we are taught to understand the world - through the scientific process - leads to the conclusion that consciousness is either an illusion or emergent. It is only through direct inspection of one's own internal experience that it becomes apparent consciousness is not an illusion. Therefore those who claim consciousness is an illusion are not in fact conscious. Those who say it is emergent are perhaps conscious but have not looked carefully enough to understand that consciousness is an entirely different category of thing to physical reality. The problem here is that science as a system of thought operates in a kind of space separate from the space of conscious experience. The intelligence born of that scientific process which is a kind of entity that exists in it's own right - is not itself conscious and hence cannot introspect correctly about consciousness. So when a person is operating in the mode of scientific thinking they are in a sense embodying that disembodied intelligence that is not aware. Or at least it is not able to introspect about it's own awareness. And so they draw incorrect and non-sensical conclusions that fly in the face of everyone's direct visceral experience. It really is quite a phenomena.
beardedetim 5y ago
I think they're two sides of the same coin. _How_ do we have any experience will be more easily answered the more we know about _what_ we actually experience. And _what_ we experience is predicated upon _how_ we experience it. I agree both need investigating. The _bigger_ question I see the coin representing is _who or what_ is experiencing in the first place? The way I see it, it's not really _a thing_ experiencing _something_ but instead _things_ experiencing _things_ at _times_.

yboris 5y ago

My favorite read on this topic is Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett He's a philosopher who has spent a lifetime thinking about this problem, informed by the latest science of the day. Plus he's an excellent, lucid writer. He is a materialist, optimistic about being able to have as-satisfactory of an explanation of consciousness in the future as we do for life (no "élan vital" needed). https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Dennett/dp/0316180661 https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Denn...

Sosh101 5y ago
Or as some like to call it Consciousness Denied :)

hsnewman 5y ago

I've been studying consciousness recently, specifically the question of how physics can explain it. It turns out there is a Strong Emergence theory, which physics shows only consciousness as proof. I find it a fascinating theory. It is strong emergence if "The whole is other than the sum of its parts."

ncmncm 5y ago
I.e., "The speed is other than the sum of the car parts." There is nothing there.
- hsnewman 5y ago
  That would be weak emergence.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    It's table stakes. If you can't process that, you are guaranteed to understand no more.

xpuente 5y ago

The right analogy is trying to understand why your favorite OS works, by trying to understand why certain window appears when you click in certain region of the screen. You need to understand up to certain level the underlying mechanisms (e.g. if you want to understand how an OS works, you need how a syscall works, then you need to understand how the processor works). All this philosophical labyrinth of words seems futile. We need to have a right system level model of the cortex and subcortical structures to progress. I feel like we are trying to resolve this problem looking at the quantum effects in the transistors (using the previously cited analogy) [neuroscience] and looking to a datacenter [cognitive science]. We need to choose the right level of abstraction. We haven't figured out what is the right one in the last 100 year. We will do... and perhaps discover that Cortico-thalamic pathway in the von Neumman base of our OS...

snikeris 5y ago

What are some evolutionary explanations for consciousness? What does the organism gain by expending energy to make its experiences conscious?

ncmncm 5y ago

That was surprisingly not complete bollocks. Bollocks is the norm when anybody talks about the "problem of consciousness'. There are legitimate questions to ask about consciousness, but nobody asks them. How does the perception of being conscious aid in survival and/or reproduction? It's kind of like wondering about what good being beautiful does for a blind, microscopic worm: not necessarily answerable, but anyway worth asking.

Dangeranger 5y ago

My completely uneducated opinion on this, is that our consciousness is an emergent property of our subconscious, and that our subconscious is an emergent property of the physics of our brain’s electrical signals. This opinion is almost certainly wrong, but it’s helped me while thinking about my own mind and experiences.

mrkramer 5y ago

Consciousness is byproduct of high intelligence and result of evolution. As your intelligence increases generation over generation it is evolutionary "logical" to be conscious and aware to increase your survival rate.

miika 5y ago

Who thinks it’s hard? When you have answer to that then you understand consciousness.

Osiris 5y ago

I do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and a common submission technique is to cut off blood flow to the brain (known as a blood choke). I've lost consciousness twice after being put into a blood choke. The experience of regaining consciousness is visceral. For those that haven't experienced it, it's very much like a turning on a computer. Initially, your brain does not (or cannot) process input like vision, sound, touch, etc. Slowly, over about 30-60 seconds, you begin to see and hear but they don't make any sense. You've completely lost the context of who and where you are. Then you begin to recognize colors and shapes, sounds of voices, etc. Eventually, you see and hear everything but still haven't built a concept of the context. Lastly, your brain seems to begin making sense of all the inputs and you regain full conscious awareness. If you think it's just like waking up from a dream or from a nap, you're wrong. It's a completely different experience, one that's so profound that I distinctly remember the entire episode even years later (and I have poor memory recall generally).

nh23423fefe 5y ago
That sounds like a slow motion version of waking from anesthesia. Waking from sleep feels very fast, but I've been put under for surgery more than once now, and coming around from surgery doesn't feel like waking up. It feels like something else completely.
bigcat123 5y ago
bitexploder 5y ago
I slept once on the mats. I literally remember feeling like I was in a fuzzy and comfortable dream and waking up to my partner shaking me and asking if I am alright. I blurted out something like "What are we doing?" and I was wondering why my partner was sitting next to me and where I was and what was going on. But not in a panicked or concerned way. Like some parts of my brain knew what was happening. But the thinking me was trying to put together all the sub-conscious streams again and get them routed correctly. Turns out his cross collar choke was tighter than I thought. It was not unpleasant and I had a mild buzzy/headache-y feel for the rest of the day. It all felt a little dreamy and is one of the strongest memories I have had in recent years. Definitely something I remember clearly. Also: if anyone is in the Denver area we have mats at our office :)

hardlianotion 5y ago

Probably the lack of an appropriate viewpoint to analyse it from.

pandoro 5y ago

Consciousness cannot be understood or known in the epistemological sense of the term since it is, by definition, the ultimate subject. It also cannot be experienced as an object. It sounds very hand-wavy and esoteric but if you think hard about it, it is absolutely and undeniably the only tenable logical position. Put in another way: if you somehow claim to be able to observe or measure consciousness as an object, then what is it that is doing the observing? Similarly, consciousness is unchanging and without beginning or end, for noticing and knowing any change you need consciousness.

Sohcahtoa82 5y ago

From how I see it, understanding consciousness is impossible because it's difficult to define and even harder to explain. Go back a couple billion years before we had life on Earth. There was no life until abiogenesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis) occurred. Somehow, over the course of a couple billion years, self-replicating molecules turns into single-celled life, then multicellular life, and eventually the complex lifeforms we see today. But...that still doesn't explain consciousness. To an external observer, a brain is just a very complex set of electrical and chemical reactions. But to that person, there's a consciousness behind it all. But that consciousness can be altered by drugs and physical injury. It calls into question if anybody actually truly has free will, or if a sufficiently advanced computer could perfectly simulate exactly how a person would react to anything given a perfect snapshot of the wiring of their neurons and states of synapses. I don't know how to define consciousness in a way that couldn't also be applied to a sufficiently advanced AI/AGI.

tasty_freeze 5y ago
> understanding consciousness is impossible because it's difficult to define and even harder to explain. For sure there isn't one agreed upon definition of consciousness. On the odd occasion I get in a discussion about it, the first thing I say is: what is your definition of consciousness. I think given a definition of consciousness, it can be discussed and progress can be made explaining that particular definition. But if the two parties don't agree to a definition up front, then it is likely to result in a trainwreck.
jstanley 5y ago
> if a sufficiently advanced computer could perfectly simulate exactly how a person would react to anything given a perfect snapshot of the wiring of their neurons and states of synapses. And if so, would that simulation still create the subjective experience? Or would it act exactly the same as the real person except the subjective experience never occurs?

CallidusAsinus 5y ago

In my experience, when reading about consciousness there are a couple types of claims you should be cautious of: 1) Claims that the causes of consciousness can be easily explained. As far as I can tell, they can't. Usually these explanations use the word "emergent" a lot, and tend to be linguistically impenetrable. Often more poetic than scientific when scrutinized closely. 2) Claims that consciousness doesn't exist. These arguments often feel like semantic nitpicking, and employ the word "illusion" as though it's somehow useful for explaining why you experience. My pet criteria for whether a statement about consciousness is useful is: "Can this possibly help explain how I can merge consciousness with someone (or something) else?" To me, this feels like a tangible measurement for how materially useful a claim about consciousness might be. An example is literature on "Split-Brain" patients (such as https://www.nature.com/articles/483260a https://www.nature.com/articles/483260a). edit: Another category to be wary of is: 3) Claims that we cannot understand consciousness. Usually these boil down to "how can consciousness understand itself?". Poetic and poignant, but not particularly useful or scientifically grounded.

contravariant 5y ago
I suppose if consciousness is indeed an illusion then that would at least explain why it's so hard to understand. Or rather it may not be that it's hard to understand but understanding an illusion usually means dispelling it, which is problematic when that illusion is consciousness. Then again claiming something is an illusion is usually less than helpful. Colour is an illusion of sorts (or a qualia if we're being technical), but 'colour is an illusion' is an unhelpful answer to the question 'why is the sky blue?'.
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- p_noumenon 5y ago
  Consciousness is literally the only thing which can't be an illusion, because it's through consciousness that illusions are perceived in the first place. Cogito ergo sum; you can doubt what you are experiencing as much as you like, maybe it's a dream, maybe it's a simulation, maybe there's an evil demon deceiving you through magical means, but you can't doubt the fact that you are experiencing at all, even doubt itself is part of the experience.

ffhhj 5y ago

Sometimes when I wake up in the morning I am "conscious" of my position in the room but the position of walls, windows, the closet, etc. doesn't match, sudendly I feel like I'm instantly turned around in space! Then I realize that my belief was wrong, and it feels like I was sleeping in another orientation on the bed. Recently I bought a telescope and took some pictures of the moon. Then I searched for a map of the moon, and to my surprise the orientation didn't match my photos. I imagined myself stading on the right side of the planet, looking at the moon which was also at the right. I realized that my "up" is actually the "side", and my photos and the map made sense. That was like the reorientation feeling, but softer. That made me think whether one thing is having a theory of this world, and another very different when a theory is deep in our consciousness.

m3kw9 5y ago

What’s more amazing is why a person is selected as your consciousness?

colordrops 5y ago

It's hard to understand consciousness, but it's not hard to understand why it's hard to understand consciousness. The problem is we are trying to understand consciousness by using consciousness. We can't step outside of it. Just like you can't directly look at your own eyes. You can see them in a mirror, and you can infer properties of consciousness by observing external phenomena, but you can't directly experience it, because you are it (at least from a materialist viewpoint - there are spiritualist traditions that say otherwise).

chasd00 5y ago
I'm no philosopher but feel the same way, the most advanced technology and thinking we have still has to be processed and understood by our own consciousness. It reminds me of the brain-in-a-vat problem. If you ever discovered you were actually just a simulation then the simulation would be paused, the bug fixed, and restarted. There's only so much that can be done with the perception available to us.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

“ Consciousness is simpler than we make it. There’s no hard problem. ” Certainly the hard problem goes away when you define it to be simpler.

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2snakes 5y ago

Whew! I read the article and this entire thread. I'm not surprised that most people are materialists. But I think if you really look into the literature with OOBEs and parapsychology you will find that there are some amazing experiences that are not explained by metaphysical materialism. And you can experience this yourself with deep meditation and/or the blessings of teachers. I think the scientific method is valid for exploring these states too. True Yoga is a science of mind control. I would advise looking into Patangali's Eight-fold Path with the goal of kaivalya/Asamprajnata Samadhi/Cosmic Consciousness and the concept of prapatti (surrender to grace of the higher self and others). Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to Scientific paradigms! An interesting perspective is also found in the RBC from brainvoyage.com and a fascinating refutation of materialism is found on p.6 here: http://www.pni.org/groundbreaking/TDVPunification.pdf http://www.pni.org/groundbreaking/TDVPunification.pdf

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guerrilla 5y ago

I think this discussion is probably dead being that it's 24 hours old now but I just came across this Wittgenstein quote and felt it might be relevant and inspire some thought on this. The limits of my language stand for the limits of my world. There really is only one world soul, which I for preference call my soul and as which alone I conceive what I call the souls of others. The above remark gives the key for deciding the way in which solipsism is a truth. (Wittgenstein 1961: 49) The I makes its appearance in philosophy through the world’s being my world. (Wittgenstein 1961: 80) Here we can see that solipsism coincides with pure realism, if it is strictly thought out. The I of solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and what remains is the reality co-ordinate with it. . . . I have to judge the world, to measure things. The philosophical I is not the human being, not the human body or the human soul with the psychological properties, but the metaphysical subject, the boundary (not a part) of the world. (Wittgenstein 1961: 82) This is the way I have travelled: Idealism singles men out from the world as unique, solipsism singles me alone out, and at last I see that I too belong with the rest of the world, and so on the one side nothing is left over, and on the other side, as unique, the world. In this way idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out. (Wittgenstein 1961: 85)