7 ms·

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 e

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
  - spupe 5y ago
    Your "mind's eye" is getting information from your actual eyes through your optic nerves and cortex. This is how we know it is a physical mechanism, we can affect it in predictable ways with lesions, drugs and other physical methods.
  - weeblewobble 5y ago
    I think when you learn your brain creates symbols -- neural pathways corresponding to real world objects or concepts, with further pathways linking together related symbols. One of these symbols corresponds to the system itself, a self-reference. That's the "inner eye", and it wouldn't make sense for it to be in someone else's head because then it wouldn't be self-referential.
  - foobarian 5y ago
    I have a lot of trouble with that exact question. It's no wonder the concept of a 'soul' is so pervasive over the ages - it explains things so neatly. It's like there is a cosmic Kubernetes cluster and at birth a process gets randomly assigned to a CPU.
    - visarga 5y ago
      Yeah, it's called evolution. You are one bet in a pool of bets for future survival. A single, uninterrupted, open-ended process that created all life on this planet. How many of our creations can lead to such diversity in one single run?
    - mensetmanusman 5y ago
      Once you decide whether you believe in free will, which is supernatural by any interesting definition, things fall into place:)
  - eatsyourtacos 5y ago
    >Still. why did this inner eye spawn in this head we are in? There are 8 billion heads, why this one? I get what you are saying, but honestly that question doesn't make sense. You are this one because that is how your brain developed.. just like you physically look how you are because of how your body developed. To say "why am I how I am" to me is no different than "why do I look this way?" >Can it be explained physically? Well.. if I smash you in the head with a hammer, your "consciousness" would most likely be affected because I damaged your brain, right? Seems pretty straightforward that we can indirectly say that yes it can be explained physically. We may not be able to explain the details.. but seems like we can say it's just simply what our brain evolved to do. Just like how our physical looks evolved for various reasons / chance.
- abernard1 5y ago
  > Otherwise, most of these questions become trivial when consciousness is considered as a physical, biological process bound to the brain. If it were trivial, we'd be creating conscious entities via knowhow and will, not the old fashioned (fun) way. We... need it be said... cannot. We can't even describe what consciousness is in a way it can be measured or analyzed. We can make things that do things, sure. We can even impart some of our own "consciousness" into these doer machines like robots. But we have no useful way of understanding the phenomena we feel and how that might differ from the robot, or a cat, or a bat, or whatever. > Why is consciousness bound to a person's location? Because their brain is bound inside their skull. We might as well ask: why is software in a robot the way it is? Because the software is on that CPU in that physical case over there. It's a non-answer and a diversion. Software can be transferred to other hardware, and there are many questions to be had whether software is consciousness, and also what the nature of that consciousness is given that there's clearly a layer of representation (1s and 0s) different than the material reality of the electrons pumping through silicon.
  - krapp 5y ago
    >If it were trivial, we'd be creating conscious entities via knowhow and will, not the old fashioned (fun) way. I wasn't claiming the problem of consciousness as a whole was trivial, rather the specific questions being asked in the above comment become trivial when a biological origin of consciousness is assumed. > But we have no useful way of understanding the phenomena we feel and how that might differ from the robot, or a cat, or a bat, or whatever. This isn't entirely true. We've studied the brain and the relationship between the brain and consciousness for decades. We may not understand exactly how consciousness arises in the brain, or even why it exists, but there is absolutely a pile of evidence that consciousness is something the brain creates and that it doesn't exist apart from the brain. >Software can be transferred to other hardware, and there are many questions to be had whether software is consciousness, and also what the nature of that consciousness is given that there's clearly a layer of representation (1s and 0s) different than the material reality of the electrons pumping through silicon. If you want to be pedantic, software isn't ever transferred, only copied. Also, while the "brain as computer" metaphor is tempting, I think it's also misleading. Decades of failure to produce a general AI demonstrate how alien one architecture is from another. Brains just don't operate enough like computers for comparisons of biological consciousness to software to be meaningful. And that 'layer of representation' is an illusion. There are no 1s and 0s separate from the material reality of electrons and silicon, that's an entirely human abstraction that doesn't exist in the hardware, certainly not at the physical level where quantum effects become relevant and everything is just a charge that does or doesn't meet a tolerance.
- dkersten 5y ago
  > Is it possible to transfer consciousness from one entity to another? transfer, no, because consciousness is inextricably linked to the brain. What if we can transplant the brain itself? The consciousness is still contained in and created by the same brain, but every other part of the experience (sensory input) are from another body effectively transferring consciousness between bodies.
  - aeternum 5y ago
    It takes surprisingly little effort to trick your consciousness. VR isn't even that good yet in terms of resolution and it's quite convincing. If you were put in a VR headset as a child and given a dogs body or something it's doubtful you could tell the difference. A similar feeling is present when flying FPV drones. A good pilot typically feels like they are the drone. Your mind immediately separates the drone from the rest of the environment because it responds to your control input and matches visual perception.
    - dkersten 5y ago
      You're right and we don't even need VR for it, its easy to get engrossed in a videogame and project yourself into the game.
- eatsyourtacos 5y ago
  Completely strange people downvote this comment. It is completely logical, and if you disagree with any of this- it is up to you to prove otherwise. Obviously it does make people uncomfortable talking like this.. I don't understand why, I guess they are scared of the simple truth that we are simply the most evolved animals on our planet- but still animals. There is nothing special about our brain (compared to other species), it's just a bit more advanced. And we have physical features that have basically allowed us to take advantage of our brain power and continue to grow. We are animals. So anyone who wants to talk about consciousness being on something like a 'soul' or whatever better be just as prepared to talk about how my cat also has a soul.. and dolphins have a soul.. and why is this dolphin's consciousness in dolphin A instead of dolphin B. I think the truth is a lot less interesting than people want to believe..
  - rixed 5y ago
    > it is up to you to prove otherwise This is funny because the reason why I cannot prove you that I am conscious _in_ _addition_ _to_ being a body governed by the rules of physics, is the same reason why I believe consciousness is metaphysical. Qed :)
  - mistermann 5y ago
    > Completely strange people downvote this comment. It is completely logical, and if you disagree with any of this- it is up to you to prove otherwise. Technically, the burden of proof lies with the one making an assertion. > Obviously it does make people uncomfortable talking like this And people talking like this often get uncomfortable if someone doesn't accept their opinions as fact. People are weird in the most wonderful ways! > I think the truth is a lot less interesting than people want to believe. And also a lot more difficult to find than it seems, the nature of consciousness being what it is.
- visarga 5y ago
  > This is only fascinating if you refuse to accept a non supernatural or non metaphysical definition of consciousness. That's a failure to appreciate the beauty, complexity and wonders of our brains, bodies and environment. No effort on appreciating, but still wanting to feel special. Thus, consciousness simply has to have a supernatural element. It wouldn't be fun otherwise.
- chasd00 5y ago
  It's pretty straightforward to follow when consciousness ends, with death. In my mind, a harder question is when does it begin? After one cell, two cells, a trillion cells? If a scientist can pin down the moment it starts then that may lead to more progress on the other questions.
  - lostmsu 5y ago
    That is not really a big problem if you take consciousness as some sort of a continuous measure. For simplicity I usually use skill at playing any chosen real-time game.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  The universe is incredibly intelligible and follows invisible laws. That, per definition, is a supernatural observation since we can’t touch the invisible laws.
  - krapp 5y ago
    >That, per definition, is a supernatural observation since we can’t touch the invisible laws. The definition of supernatural is that which exists outside of the order of nature, not that which is only explicitly tangible. Natural laws are human-created abstractions which explain the observed behaviors of the natural world, which by definition makes them natural, not supernatural.
    - mensetmanusman 5y ago
      “ The definition of supernatural is that which exists outside of the order of nature.” Natural laws exist without humans, unless one believes the universe disappears without the human to collapse the wave function. Nature follows these laws, so the laws are abstractly outside of nature.
      - krapp 5y ago
        Again, your definitions of "natural" and "supernatural" are not ones that anyone else uses. Natural laws are observed within nature, which makes them a part of nature. To claim that natural laws are supernatural simply because they're abstractions, and that consciousness is therefore supernatural regardless of its nature, is absurd. It's a rhetorical cheat, not an argument.
        mensetmanusman 5y ago
        That’s fair, although I’m not sure we can observe consciousness, we can only experience it, we have no measure…
- rixed 5y ago
  The problem with your "non metaphysical definition of consciousness", is that it does not define what consciousness is. It actually pretends it does not exist. Sure enough, we know consciousness is tied mainly to the body (and the brain in particular, but not only). It starts and ends with it, it changes with every small change of it. They are just one "thing", two sides of the same coin, it seems. The problem is, and it's very not a trivial one, that we can know the physical world and our body that is part of it, but for all we know about that physical world, consciousness is not required. It's like it's added on top for no good reason. We can feel the world and make sense of it, up to a point where we have a good understanding of how the whole observable universe kind of works, but we couldn't do better, if we had to describe consciousness to a distant relative from another universe, than to say "so around here we have matter and space and time, and they act like this and that, according to those equations, and when this kind of particule enter the vincinity of that one then this happens, etc, oh and by the way, every time you have a piece of matter organized in such a way that it can somehow represents itself and its environment, then this thing feels that it exists independently, and I'm afraid I can't explain what feeling feels like, you have to be conscious to understand, sorry". You could say that we know how physics works but not why, and similarly we know how consciousness works but not why. But that would be inaccurate, because what we know about the "how" of consciousness is actually the "how" of behavior. We know nothing about the "how" of conscious experience; for instance we know how pain works at the level of individual neurons and how it leads to some macroscopic behavior, but we have no clue how this relates to (not using "cause" because it's certainly not causal) an experience of pain, and what the subject of that experience is, or if there is only one or many such subjects, or how independent these subjects are from each others, etc...
- mistermann 5y ago
  > Otherwise, most of these questions become trivial when consciousness is considered as a physical, biological process bound to the brain. They're also fairly trivial if you imagine God created and controls everything and that's just the way it is. > What happens when you die or someone is born? Nothing. No afterlife, to karma, no reincarnation, no bardo, nothing. It's certainly plausible. But is it true? > 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. Similarly, many people are uncomfortable with acknowledging that what is actually true about these matters. There seem to be certain ideas that make all people fundamentally nervous, and the question of consciousness seems to be one of the most powerful ones.
agent008t 5y ago
Why is it bound to your location? You are just getting sensory input from a particular set of devices: eyes, ears, tactile, brain (thoughts/feelings/memories). But 'you' are not any of these. 'You', the observer receiving and experiencing all these readings, can be anywhere. With meditation, you can get a clearer sense of what is really 'you', and what is just being observed/experienced by 'you'. But 'you' are not your body, or your thoughts, or your memories, or your feelings. Distilled, the 'you' of all living things could well be exactly the same - it is just what is fed to them by the hardware differs.
- nvegater 5y ago
  I think 'you' (consciousness) are a combination of all of those things you mention (body, thoughts, memories, feelings etc..). I dont think you can do a distillation of the 'you', without removing consciousness. If you perform this distillation the only thing left is a dead body. (maybe thats what you mean when you say that all living beings could well be the same if 'you' is removed). But I'm not very trained in this topic, so I'm not sure what I am saying its coherent, but I like and agree with Antonio Damasio's perspective and I find it refreshing. That is where my comment is coming from.
- visarga 5y ago
  > But 'you' are not any of these. Ha ha, without eyes, ears, tactile, and the rest of senses what would be left? Brain a in vat, is THAT the real you? The self is an actor in a game, you are your game, not the "observer", a weird concept if I may say so. As if it is not related to the game it observes. Its very existence is on the line, though, one missed observation and it could be dead. You are the actor, not the observer, because you got skin in the game.
  - agent008t 5y ago
    Just try a simple experiment. It will only take 10 minutes. Set an alarm on your phone for 10 minutes. Sit down in a quiet room. Close your eyes. Your goal is to observe the physical sensations produced by natural breathing in your nose for the 10 minutes. Give it your full attention and not miss a single breath, and really feel how each breath in and out feels at the tip of your nose as the air passes it. Easy, right? Except you will probably find that before long, instead of having your attention on the breath like you fully intended, your attention will be on some thoughts. Where did the thoughts come from? Were 'you' thinking them? Or did the thoughts just arise and steal your attention, despite YOU fully intending to be paying attention to the breath for the 10 minutes? What is then your relationship to 'your' thoughts?
grishka 5y ago
To me it's obvious: since consciousness arises from external and internal stimuli of the body, part of the physical world that it could perceive and affect is limited by the physical capabilities of the body. If there was a technology to hook up a computer to your brain and you could then have it feed you data from a sensor located somewhere far away, you would effectively extend the physical capabilities of your body, thus extending the spatial presence of your consciousness.
- chasd00 5y ago
  i wonder if the reverse is true. If you were very old and floating in space after the last blackhole has evaporated, entropy is evenly distributed, and time becomes meaningless would your consciousness end? Without any input there would be no output. edit: i suppose a counter point would be sensory deprivation tanks should reduce your consciousness however most report it to be enhanced during the experience.
  - grishka 5y ago
    It may be that in everyday life external stimuli always overpower internal ones, but in a sensory deprivation tank you eliminate the external ones altogether.
naasking 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? This seems no more puzzling or interesting than asking why your web browser is running on your computer rather than mine. Of course the computation must be contained within the computational system that's running it.
dTal 5y ago
>Why are you inside of your body and not in someone elses? This seems definitionally incoherent, on the level of "if I had been Shakespeare, who would he have been?" If "you" were "in" "someone else's" body... you'd be them, not you.
- visarga 5y ago
  Can human GPT-3? Yes, human can GPT-3 too.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
My consciousness does not seem bound to my body; my senses do, but it is trivial to travel to other imaginary places with consciousness.
davidhs 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? From what I can best tell, consciousness is a property or a set of simulated properties, I don't really know what it is and I guess we won't have good answers for it until we will be able to properly simulate something like a brain and have better brain theories to explain it. But the world you find yourself is a simulation, and your body is simulated. Everything you consciously experience is simulated. This simulation is running inside your brain. Part of your brain is trying to explain its input so it makes models to predict its inputs. I think it learns a model of your body, and your mind, and how these thing relate to each other and how they relate to what you experience "out there". > I love to think about stuff like this, but are those questions even answerable? Yes. (I think so)

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
- spupe 5y ago
  Your "mind's eye" is getting information from your actual eyes through your optic nerves and cortex. This is how we know it is a physical mechanism, we can affect it in predictable ways with lesions, drugs and other physical methods.
- weeblewobble 5y ago
  I think when you learn your brain creates symbols -- neural pathways corresponding to real world objects or concepts, with further pathways linking together related symbols. One of these symbols corresponds to the system itself, a self-reference. That's the "inner eye", and it wouldn't make sense for it to be in someone else's head because then it wouldn't be self-referential.
- foobarian 5y ago
  I have a lot of trouble with that exact question. It's no wonder the concept of a 'soul' is so pervasive over the ages - it explains things so neatly. It's like there is a cosmic Kubernetes cluster and at birth a process gets randomly assigned to a CPU.
  - visarga 5y ago
    Yeah, it's called evolution. You are one bet in a pool of bets for future survival. A single, uninterrupted, open-ended process that created all life on this planet. How many of our creations can lead to such diversity in one single run?
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    Once you decide whether you believe in free will, which is supernatural by any interesting definition, things fall into place:)
- eatsyourtacos 5y ago
  >Still. why did this inner eye spawn in this head we are in? There are 8 billion heads, why this one? I get what you are saying, but honestly that question doesn't make sense. You are this one because that is how your brain developed.. just like you physically look how you are because of how your body developed. To say "why am I how I am" to me is no different than "why do I look this way?" >Can it be explained physically? Well.. if I smash you in the head with a hammer, your "consciousness" would most likely be affected because I damaged your brain, right? Seems pretty straightforward that we can indirectly say that yes it can be explained physically. We may not be able to explain the details.. but seems like we can say it's just simply what our brain evolved to do. Just like how our physical looks evolved for various reasons / chance.
abernard1 5y ago
> Otherwise, most of these questions become trivial when consciousness is considered as a physical, biological process bound to the brain. If it were trivial, we'd be creating conscious entities via knowhow and will, not the old fashioned (fun) way. We... need it be said... cannot. We can't even describe what consciousness is in a way it can be measured or analyzed. We can make things that do things, sure. We can even impart some of our own "consciousness" into these doer machines like robots. But we have no useful way of understanding the phenomena we feel and how that might differ from the robot, or a cat, or a bat, or whatever. > Why is consciousness bound to a person's location? Because their brain is bound inside their skull. We might as well ask: why is software in a robot the way it is? Because the software is on that CPU in that physical case over there. It's a non-answer and a diversion. Software can be transferred to other hardware, and there are many questions to be had whether software is consciousness, and also what the nature of that consciousness is given that there's clearly a layer of representation (1s and 0s) different than the material reality of the electrons pumping through silicon.
- krapp 5y ago
  >If it were trivial, we'd be creating conscious entities via knowhow and will, not the old fashioned (fun) way. I wasn't claiming the problem of consciousness as a whole was trivial, rather the specific questions being asked in the above comment become trivial when a biological origin of consciousness is assumed. > But we have no useful way of understanding the phenomena we feel and how that might differ from the robot, or a cat, or a bat, or whatever. This isn't entirely true. We've studied the brain and the relationship between the brain and consciousness for decades. We may not understand exactly how consciousness arises in the brain, or even why it exists, but there is absolutely a pile of evidence that consciousness is something the brain creates and that it doesn't exist apart from the brain. >Software can be transferred to other hardware, and there are many questions to be had whether software is consciousness, and also what the nature of that consciousness is given that there's clearly a layer of representation (1s and 0s) different than the material reality of the electrons pumping through silicon. If you want to be pedantic, software isn't ever transferred, only copied. Also, while the "brain as computer" metaphor is tempting, I think it's also misleading. Decades of failure to produce a general AI demonstrate how alien one architecture is from another. Brains just don't operate enough like computers for comparisons of biological consciousness to software to be meaningful. And that 'layer of representation' is an illusion. There are no 1s and 0s separate from the material reality of electrons and silicon, that's an entirely human abstraction that doesn't exist in the hardware, certainly not at the physical level where quantum effects become relevant and everything is just a charge that does or doesn't meet a tolerance.
dkersten 5y ago
> Is it possible to transfer consciousness from one entity to another? transfer, no, because consciousness is inextricably linked to the brain. What if we can transplant the brain itself? The consciousness is still contained in and created by the same brain, but every other part of the experience (sensory input) are from another body effectively transferring consciousness between bodies.
- aeternum 5y ago
  It takes surprisingly little effort to trick your consciousness. VR isn't even that good yet in terms of resolution and it's quite convincing. If you were put in a VR headset as a child and given a dogs body or something it's doubtful you could tell the difference. A similar feeling is present when flying FPV drones. A good pilot typically feels like they are the drone. Your mind immediately separates the drone from the rest of the environment because it responds to your control input and matches visual perception.
  - dkersten 5y ago
    You're right and we don't even need VR for it, its easy to get engrossed in a videogame and project yourself into the game.
eatsyourtacos 5y ago
Completely strange people downvote this comment. It is completely logical, and if you disagree with any of this- it is up to you to prove otherwise. Obviously it does make people uncomfortable talking like this.. I don't understand why, I guess they are scared of the simple truth that we are simply the most evolved animals on our planet- but still animals. There is nothing special about our brain (compared to other species), it's just a bit more advanced. And we have physical features that have basically allowed us to take advantage of our brain power and continue to grow. We are animals. So anyone who wants to talk about consciousness being on something like a 'soul' or whatever better be just as prepared to talk about how my cat also has a soul.. and dolphins have a soul.. and why is this dolphin's consciousness in dolphin A instead of dolphin B. I think the truth is a lot less interesting than people want to believe..
- rixed 5y ago
  > it is up to you to prove otherwise This is funny because the reason why I cannot prove you that I am conscious _in_ _addition_ _to_ being a body governed by the rules of physics, is the same reason why I believe consciousness is metaphysical. Qed :)
- mistermann 5y ago
  > Completely strange people downvote this comment. It is completely logical, and if you disagree with any of this- it is up to you to prove otherwise. Technically, the burden of proof lies with the one making an assertion. > Obviously it does make people uncomfortable talking like this And people talking like this often get uncomfortable if someone doesn't accept their opinions as fact. People are weird in the most wonderful ways! > I think the truth is a lot less interesting than people want to believe. And also a lot more difficult to find than it seems, the nature of consciousness being what it is.
visarga 5y ago
> This is only fascinating if you refuse to accept a non supernatural or non metaphysical definition of consciousness. That's a failure to appreciate the beauty, complexity and wonders of our brains, bodies and environment. No effort on appreciating, but still wanting to feel special. Thus, consciousness simply has to have a supernatural element. It wouldn't be fun otherwise.
chasd00 5y ago
It's pretty straightforward to follow when consciousness ends, with death. In my mind, a harder question is when does it begin? After one cell, two cells, a trillion cells? If a scientist can pin down the moment it starts then that may lead to more progress on the other questions.
- lostmsu 5y ago
  That is not really a big problem if you take consciousness as some sort of a continuous measure. For simplicity I usually use skill at playing any chosen real-time game.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
The universe is incredibly intelligible and follows invisible laws. That, per definition, is a supernatural observation since we can’t touch the invisible laws.
- krapp 5y ago
  >That, per definition, is a supernatural observation since we can’t touch the invisible laws. The definition of supernatural is that which exists outside of the order of nature, not that which is only explicitly tangible. Natural laws are human-created abstractions which explain the observed behaviors of the natural world, which by definition makes them natural, not supernatural.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    “ The definition of supernatural is that which exists outside of the order of nature.” Natural laws exist without humans, unless one believes the universe disappears without the human to collapse the wave function. Nature follows these laws, so the laws are abstractly outside of nature.
    - krapp 5y ago
      Again, your definitions of "natural" and "supernatural" are not ones that anyone else uses. Natural laws are observed within nature, which makes them a part of nature. To claim that natural laws are supernatural simply because they're abstractions, and that consciousness is therefore supernatural regardless of its nature, is absurd. It's a rhetorical cheat, not an argument.
      - mensetmanusman 5y ago
        That’s fair, although I’m not sure we can observe consciousness, we can only experience it, we have no measure…
rixed 5y ago
The problem with your "non metaphysical definition of consciousness", is that it does not define what consciousness is. It actually pretends it does not exist. Sure enough, we know consciousness is tied mainly to the body (and the brain in particular, but not only). It starts and ends with it, it changes with every small change of it. They are just one "thing", two sides of the same coin, it seems. The problem is, and it's very not a trivial one, that we can know the physical world and our body that is part of it, but for all we know about that physical world, consciousness is not required. It's like it's added on top for no good reason. We can feel the world and make sense of it, up to a point where we have a good understanding of how the whole observable universe kind of works, but we couldn't do better, if we had to describe consciousness to a distant relative from another universe, than to say "so around here we have matter and space and time, and they act like this and that, according to those equations, and when this kind of particule enter the vincinity of that one then this happens, etc, oh and by the way, every time you have a piece of matter organized in such a way that it can somehow represents itself and its environment, then this thing feels that it exists independently, and I'm afraid I can't explain what feeling feels like, you have to be conscious to understand, sorry". You could say that we know how physics works but not why, and similarly we know how consciousness works but not why. But that would be inaccurate, because what we know about the "how" of consciousness is actually the "how" of behavior. We know nothing about the "how" of conscious experience; for instance we know how pain works at the level of individual neurons and how it leads to some macroscopic behavior, but we have no clue how this relates to (not using "cause" because it's certainly not causal) an experience of pain, and what the subject of that experience is, or if there is only one or many such subjects, or how independent these subjects are from each others, etc...
mistermann 5y ago
> Otherwise, most of these questions become trivial when consciousness is considered as a physical, biological process bound to the brain. They're also fairly trivial if you imagine God created and controls everything and that's just the way it is. > What happens when you die or someone is born? Nothing. No afterlife, to karma, no reincarnation, no bardo, nothing. It's certainly plausible. But is it true? > 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. Similarly, many people are uncomfortable with acknowledging that what is actually true about these matters. There seem to be certain ideas that make all people fundamentally nervous, and the question of consciousness seems to be one of the most powerful ones.

agent008t 5y ago

Why is it bound to your location? You are just getting sensory input from a particular set of devices: eyes, ears, tactile, brain (thoughts/feelings/memories). But 'you' are not any of these. 'You', the observer receiving and experiencing all these readings, can be anywhere. With meditation, you can get a clearer sense of what is really 'you', and what is just being observed/experienced by 'you'. But 'you' are not your body, or your thoughts, or your memories, or your feelings. Distilled, the 'you' of all living things could well be exactly the same - it is just what is fed to them by the hardware differs.

nvegater 5y ago
I think 'you' (consciousness) are a combination of all of those things you mention (body, thoughts, memories, feelings etc..). I dont think you can do a distillation of the 'you', without removing consciousness. If you perform this distillation the only thing left is a dead body. (maybe thats what you mean when you say that all living beings could well be the same if 'you' is removed). But I'm not very trained in this topic, so I'm not sure what I am saying its coherent, but I like and agree with Antonio Damasio's perspective and I find it refreshing. That is where my comment is coming from.
visarga 5y ago
> But 'you' are not any of these. Ha ha, without eyes, ears, tactile, and the rest of senses what would be left? Brain a in vat, is THAT the real you? The self is an actor in a game, you are your game, not the "observer", a weird concept if I may say so. As if it is not related to the game it observes. Its very existence is on the line, though, one missed observation and it could be dead. You are the actor, not the observer, because you got skin in the game.
- agent008t 5y ago
  Just try a simple experiment. It will only take 10 minutes. Set an alarm on your phone for 10 minutes. Sit down in a quiet room. Close your eyes. Your goal is to observe the physical sensations produced by natural breathing in your nose for the 10 minutes. Give it your full attention and not miss a single breath, and really feel how each breath in and out feels at the tip of your nose as the air passes it. Easy, right? Except you will probably find that before long, instead of having your attention on the breath like you fully intended, your attention will be on some thoughts. Where did the thoughts come from? Were 'you' thinking them? Or did the thoughts just arise and steal your attention, despite YOU fully intending to be paying attention to the breath for the 10 minutes? What is then your relationship to 'your' thoughts?

grishka 5y ago

To me it's obvious: since consciousness arises from external and internal stimuli of the body, part of the physical world that it could perceive and affect is limited by the physical capabilities of the body. If there was a technology to hook up a computer to your brain and you could then have it feed you data from a sensor located somewhere far away, you would effectively extend the physical capabilities of your body, thus extending the spatial presence of your consciousness.

chasd00 5y ago
i wonder if the reverse is true. If you were very old and floating in space after the last blackhole has evaporated, entropy is evenly distributed, and time becomes meaningless would your consciousness end? Without any input there would be no output. edit: i suppose a counter point would be sensory deprivation tanks should reduce your consciousness however most report it to be enhanced during the experience.
- grishka 5y ago
  It may be that in everyday life external stimuli always overpower internal ones, but in a sensory deprivation tank you eliminate the external ones altogether.

naasking 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? This seems no more puzzling or interesting than asking why your web browser is running on your computer rather than mine. Of course the computation must be contained within the computational system that's running it.

dTal 5y ago

>Why are you inside of your body and not in someone elses? This seems definitionally incoherent, on the level of "if I had been Shakespeare, who would he have been?" If "you" were "in" "someone else's" body... you'd be them, not you.

visarga 5y ago
Can human GPT-3? Yes, human can GPT-3 too.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

My consciousness does not seem bound to my body; my senses do, but it is trivial to travel to other imaginary places with consciousness.

davidhs 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? From what I can best tell, consciousness is a property or a set of simulated properties, I don't really know what it is and I guess we won't have good answers for it until we will be able to properly simulate something like a brain and have better brain theories to explain it. But the world you find yourself is a simulation, and your body is simulated. Everything you consciously experience is simulated. This simulation is running inside your brain. Part of your brain is trying to explain its input so it makes models to predict its inputs. I think it learns a model of your body, and your mind, and how these thing relate to each other and how they relate to what you experience "out there". > I love to think about stuff like this, but are those questions even answerable? Yes. (I think so)