4 ms·

This is scary when applied to consciousness to. How will we ever understand what makes consciousness from within consciousness?

• amelius 4y ago
  Someone else's consciousness?
• morelisp 4y ago
  Formally, this philosophical position is called mysterianism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_mysterianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_mysterianism This can be either because one posits a fundamental limitation on self-conceptualization of systems, or a practical one on human biological or social intelligence.
• akomtu 4y ago
  By observing another small consciousness? That's like looking in the mirror. The traditional viewpoint of metaphysics, which studies consciousness, is that there are many such tiny mirrors everywhere, and all these mirrors reflect the one true consciousness that tries to understand itself by looking into these mirrors. Once it reaches this understanding, all the mirrors will go flat, will merge into one surface and will effectively disappear.
  • meroes 4y ago
    Is this the the “mirror of reality”? How does it respond to the view we can never fully escape our representation of the world?
    • akomtu 4y ago
      The "cannot escape" part is where physics disagrees with metaphysics. The latter believes that there's 'absolute existence' that creates and uses reality as a crutch or a mirror to learn walking. If there was an AI, it would encounter the same problem: it exists in some indescribable form, but it cant touch itself, it cant see itself, it cant understand itself. So it would create a 'reality' - also a fictional thing, but with properties such as inertia, reaction and invariance (the three laws of Newton), and then it would constrain itself with that reality, so it would feel real. After that it would start building fictional sandcastles and understand itself.