5 ms·
The answer always seemed obvious to me. There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully aliv
by starwind 4y ago
The answer always seemed obvious to me. There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can't define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there's something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next --Robert Ford, Westworld
- whimsicalism 4y agoPeople hate this take, but to me it is obvious. Our conscious experience has to ultimately be illusory, because we know that at least parts of it are verifiably false - like our perception of free will when really what actions we take are close to deterministic.
- ryeights 4y agoSo consciousness is an illusion. Great. Then what are you experiencing right now? Who is experiencing it?
- whimsicalism 4y agoIf what defines an agent who experiences something is something that takes in inputs, makes a "choice" independent of the base, deterministic interactions of atoms in their brain, and then executes on that choice - then nobody is experiencing it. I agree that this is a difficult question - but it is equally obvious that the way we experience the world is not real. We feel that we have free will but we know we don't.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoSo it was preordained since the beginning of time that you would write this comment and that I would reply to you?
- whimsicalism 4y agoQuantum effects aside, yes.
- TuringTest 4y agoTo the extension that "preordained" has any meaning at all in a chaotic system.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoThis seems to be self defeating. Since everyone’s words, including yours, would be those of the primordial demiurge (?) who got the ball rolling. If ‘quantum effects’ are large enough to affect that causal chain then they would be enough to affect the course of human action.
- whimsicalism 4y agoSelf-defeating? In what way? > If ‘quantum effects’ are large enough to affect that causal chain then they would be enough to affect the course of human action. Yes, but they are just manifestations of a deterministically evolving wavefunction.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoSo you assert all words, including yours, ultimately derive from a ‘deterministically evolving wavefunction’?
- whimsicalism 4y agoAssert? No, this is what all evidence indicates.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoYou certainly seem to be asserting something. Whatever any evidence indicates is only probabilistic and thus needs to be hedged with modifiers to be taken seriously. And regardless, your words, and everyone else's, were still determined at the beginning of time, if your argument is true. That's why this line of reasoning is self-defeating, since if one accepts it they will ignore you since they literally can have no effect on you, nor you on them.
- disgruntledphd2 4y agoHow do we know this?
- disgruntledphd2 4y agoThis statement is the hard problem in a nutshell.
- TuringTest 4y agoThe experiences are having themselves.
- mort96 4y agoI don't understand the whole "free will is an illusion" thing. To me it seems obvious; I clearly do have free will because I choose to do things on my own volition. And the "me" who does the choosing is made up of largely deterministic electrochemical processes which respond to stimuli, with a bunch of feedback loops and other complexity. That is all my consciousness is, after all. I don't even know what it would mean for free will to be an "illusion".
- cillian64 4y agoThe idea is that if you’re a bag of chemicals then any decision you make is entirely predetermined based on your current state and the stimulus you receive (potentially modulo some quantum randomness and plenty of chaos). If the decision is totally predictable and predetermined then it stops looking like free will, from a certain point of view. But it’s really just a question of the semantics of “free will”. Trying to work out whether you could choose differently to your predetermined choice just isn’t a meaningful concept. Imagine you have a deterministic program which returns true or false based on some inputs. If it is modified to return the opposite of what it previously returned, it is no less deterministic.
- cecilpl2 4y agoI think it's clearly true that we have internal processes which cause us to take actions. If those processes are entirely deterministic then that means every action you take is also deterministic - as in, you could not have acted otherwise. When there are two choices laid out before you, you "choose" one in the same sense that an NPC in a video game chooses its actions: by running a complex set of internal logic. "Free will" is the notion that you have the freedom to exert your will to choose courses of action. Even though you chose to do A, you could have instead have chosen to do B.
- zild3d 4y agoIt sounds to me like you just explained the "illusion". You're made up of deterministic processes, but it feels like you're making a choice.
- 4y ago