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Your comment reminds me of religious people, whose argument that God exists is similar: that you will realize that He exists as soon as you believe in Him. And

Your comment reminds me of religious people, whose argument that God exists is similar: that you will realize that He exists as soon as you believe in Him. And that you can't possibly understand it otherwise. Consciousness is a hard problem until you realize that most of it is an illusion. Which is the very reason that it is so hard to understand: there's nothing to understand, because it's not real.

blueflow 5y ago
Believing in God is a good coping mechanism if you cant deal with the fact that things, both good and bad, happen for no reason all the time. Knowing "why" gives comfort in the vast chaos that is reality.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  Plenty of people believe in God(s) yet don't think that things are controlled or predestined.
whaaswijk 5y ago
Serious question: how can consciousness be an illusion? I’m not even sure what that would mean. One could argue that many things are illusory (e.g. the external world). But it’s quite hard to dismiss the notion of actual experience occurring in the world. Our experiences could lead us to false conclusions, sure, but we cannot deny their existence.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  Either it's inane wordplay or it's obviously nonsense for most definitions of conscious. An illusion must be perceived, so in that sense the proposition is self-refuting. Also, you have empirical evidence against it: you know when you're conscious and that sometimes you aren't (and that it's a spectrum.) Thirdly, you can behaviorally define conscious. Fourthly, if I'm not mistaken, you can measure its presence neurologically. To say that all of this is an illusion is stupidity or being very obtuse for attention (like clickbait.)
- jbotz 5y ago
  The experiences are real, but the homunculus behind your eyes that you think of as yourself is an illusion. In reality there are a bunch of fairly independent processes talking to each other, sharing the perceptions, reacting to them, feedback from those reactions again become a perception, a "narrator" process that often gives running commentary in your mother-tongue, etc. The interaction of those processes feels like a unified thing, "you", and that's the illusion. This illusion has adaptive advantages, because it helps the organism take care of its needs, so evolution selects for it. That's my take, maybe not exactly the same as Damasio and Seth's, but compatible with theirs.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    I think they were referring to Daniel Dennett, not Antonio Damasio or Anil Seth. Damasio is interested in how the self is constructed (so, similar to your idea) while Seth is saying that experience is a controlled hallucination. Dennett is the one claiming consciousness is an illusion. These are three very distinct research programs.
    - jbotz 5y ago
      Except that they all agree that there is no "hard problem of consciousness", that's the part that's illusory. I think Dennett takes the illusion position too far, so I think I'm somewhere between those three. But there are others who take it further even, such as Graziano in "Consciouness and the Social Brain" whose "consciousness is an attention schema" position seems so nonsensical to me that I can't even explain it despite having the read the book.
  - whaaswijk 5y ago
    If I understand correctly, you're referring to the "easy" problem of consciousness, i.e. the "mechanistic" explanation of how a self could be constructed by the brain. That's an interesting question and I think your take is a coherent and plausible one (from a materialistic perspective). However, I still think this doesn't get around the hard problem of why these interactions actually feel like anything. I've never heard a satisfying materialistic explanation of that. Do you believe the interactions could in principle be implemented on any Turing machine? Or are they substrate dependent?

blueflow 5y ago

Believing in God is a good coping mechanism if you cant deal with the fact that things, both good and bad, happen for no reason all the time. Knowing "why" gives comfort in the vast chaos that is reality.

missedthecue 5y ago
Plenty of people believe in God(s) yet don't think that things are controlled or predestined.

whaaswijk 5y ago

Serious question: how can consciousness be an illusion? I’m not even sure what that would mean. One could argue that many things are illusory (e.g. the external world). But it’s quite hard to dismiss the notion of actual experience occurring in the world. Our experiences could lead us to false conclusions, sure, but we cannot deny their existence.

guerrilla 5y ago
Either it's inane wordplay or it's obviously nonsense for most definitions of conscious. An illusion must be perceived, so in that sense the proposition is self-refuting. Also, you have empirical evidence against it: you know when you're conscious and that sometimes you aren't (and that it's a spectrum.) Thirdly, you can behaviorally define conscious. Fourthly, if I'm not mistaken, you can measure its presence neurologically. To say that all of this is an illusion is stupidity or being very obtuse for attention (like clickbait.)
jbotz 5y ago
The experiences are real, but the homunculus behind your eyes that you think of as yourself is an illusion. In reality there are a bunch of fairly independent processes talking to each other, sharing the perceptions, reacting to them, feedback from those reactions again become a perception, a "narrator" process that often gives running commentary in your mother-tongue, etc. The interaction of those processes feels like a unified thing, "you", and that's the illusion. This illusion has adaptive advantages, because it helps the organism take care of its needs, so evolution selects for it. That's my take, maybe not exactly the same as Damasio and Seth's, but compatible with theirs.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  I think they were referring to Daniel Dennett, not Antonio Damasio or Anil Seth. Damasio is interested in how the self is constructed (so, similar to your idea) while Seth is saying that experience is a controlled hallucination. Dennett is the one claiming consciousness is an illusion. These are three very distinct research programs.
  - jbotz 5y ago
    Except that they all agree that there is no "hard problem of consciousness", that's the part that's illusory. I think Dennett takes the illusion position too far, so I think I'm somewhere between those three. But there are others who take it further even, such as Graziano in "Consciouness and the Social Brain" whose "consciousness is an attention schema" position seems so nonsensical to me that I can't even explain it despite having the read the book.
- whaaswijk 5y ago
  If I understand correctly, you're referring to the "easy" problem of consciousness, i.e. the "mechanistic" explanation of how a self could be constructed by the brain. That's an interesting question and I think your take is a coherent and plausible one (from a materialistic perspective). However, I still think this doesn't get around the hard problem of why these interactions actually feel like anything. I've never heard a satisfying materialistic explanation of that. Do you believe the interactions could in principle be implemented on any Turing machine? Or are they substrate dependent?