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> My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion It is probably just a difference in semantics but for me, it seems like co

• colordrops 4y ago
  It seems to go even deeper. Not even that "I" am having a subjective experience is undeniable, but only that there is a subjective experience at all. When deconstructing sensory and thought phenomena, it can be found that any particular trait that points to "I" is actually ephemeral, and not a permanent fixture of the experiencer. For instance, the sense that there is a face and eyes that is being looked out through or a personality that has a history and persists through time disappear when in a state of flow or when dreaming. They are just concepts, and all concepts are built on wet sand.
  • 3g4o53g4o5 4y ago
    Sorry but you always forgot that when you sleep your consciousness disappeared. Please take account for this fact. When all sensory shut down, really you feel nothing and of cos think nothing.
    • _moof 4y ago
      Until you start dreaming.
      • kazinator 4y ago
        It's when you're anaesthesized for surgery that your consciousness goes away. No dreams, nothing. You don't exist during those hours. You cannot account for them later; they are deleted.
        • lowwave 4y ago
          Or that we just don't remember the dream states. Have you ever woken up and the dream rapidly fades away?
        • mongol 4y ago
          When I had surgery, I had very lucid dreams. And they were actually quite arousing. Afterwards I heard that it was actually common.
        • Tor3 4y ago
          When I woke up after surgery I felt that 1.5 hours had passed. But in actuality it was something around 4 hours since I went under. It turned out that 1.5 hours before I woke up I had been brought out of anesthesia and after that I simply slept. I didn't have any dreams at all, but at least my internal clock had started working. A clock presumably doesn't need consciousness, but there's definitely a qualitative difference between anesthesia and sleep. And as I sometimes suddenly wake up with a solution to some problem, with no recallable dream preceding it, my personal subjective opinion is that there's some level of consciousness going on even in sleep. That anesthesia experience was so very different from anything I had experienced before, with no recall whatsoever of the time that had passed.
          • psychoslave 4y ago
            How do you estimate time elapsed without external inputs? Experiments where people cut themselves from external stimuli seem to show that on the contrary, we don’t good internal clocks on this regard.
            • Tor3 4y ago
              I nearly always "know" how long I have been asleep, unless there's been excessive drinking involved (and that would be long ago). "Normal" drinking doesn't seem to affect this. And for shorter naps (less than two hours) it's pretty accurate.
            • kazinator 4y ago
    • nanomonkey 4y ago
      My consciousness doesn't seem to disappear when I fall asleep, only my awareness of my bodies sensations. I often go to sleep reading, and the thoughts I'm having about the book I'm reading will continue for quite some time, even after my eyes close. I know this because I often startle myself awake by dropping my book. I also have similar experiences as I wake up, my consciousness slowly starts to incorporate my sensations of reality with the thought process that is continuously going in my head.
    • whittingtonaaon 4y ago
      Consciousness can end temporarily, perhaps permanently. This in no way suggests that it’s an illusion. The claim that consciousness is an illusion has always seemed like nonsense to me; for, if consciousness is an illusion, who experiences that illusion? Answer: the conscious mind.
      • vbezhenar 4y ago
        Consciousness is a trick for human neural network to simplify some calculations about the world. It was developed as an evolutionary trait and proved useful to survive. That's my opinion. It's not an illusion, it definitely exists as an particular configuration of neurons.
        • hnthrway 4y ago
          Why put the cart before the horse
      • criddell 4y ago
        > Answer: the conscious mind. It's a controversial idea, but depending on the state of the brain, there may be more than one consciousness. Maybe "you" are actually a committee.
        • Seb-C 4y ago
          I like the opposite idea, that maybe we are all the same consciousness, projected in bodies that have different subjective experiences and memories.
    • plutonorm 4y ago
      I think memory shuts down when you sleep. So that it still feels like something to be sleeping, only we cannot recall it when we awake, because it is not persisted in memory. This is the same reason we cannot remember what it is like to be a rock, even though it does feel like something to be a rock.
    • TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
      Waking consciousness disappears. But sleeping people are not even close to being unconscious. They can dream, and they're aware enough to know they should probably wake up if they're prodded hard enough. Conveniently this metaphor works at multiple levels. Not even medically unconscious people are guaranteed to be completely non-sentient. Ask any anaesthetist.
    • jusssi 4y ago
      No it doesn't. When you actually pass out, there's a very real sense of discontinuity. You find yourself on the floor, unsure how long you've been there (even if it was just seconds), and how exactly you got to that position (the previous recorded memory being you standing there and feeling woozy). It's very different from just sleeping, where you still retain a feeling of continuity with both place and time.
  • thom 4y ago
    Bertrand Russell made this point about Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum”, stating it would more correctly be something like “there are thoughts”.
    • TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
      Which doesn't solve the problem, because it define what a "thought" is. And besides - there are also emotions and physical sensations.
      • thom 4y ago
        We can just lump all these together as “qualia”. “There are qualia” is the basest possible conclusion that can be drawn, as opposed to “I have qualia, therefore I am”.
        • gfodor 4y ago
          Yeah I take it to mean this way too, its very strange that Descartes is controversial among eg panpsychics because of the fixation on the term 'think' - it seems pretty clear that he was just noticing that qualia exists and is the only real axiom one can rely on for any kind of self-induced philosophy of mind.
    • xoac 4y ago
      But in this case Russell was completely wrong because he interprets Descartes' cogito as a syllogism whereas it is a performative statement. Descrates' is only establishing that it's self-evident for himself that he exists, and not to assert to anyone external that he or his thoughts exist.
      • thom 4y ago
        He’s making the point that he-ness and himself-ness is too bold a conclusion to draw from the mere existence of thoughts.
        • 4y ago
• stormbrew 4y ago
  > That I am having a subjective experience is undeniable. If you wanted to go about proving (even to yourself) that you are not, say, an extremely advanced ML algorithm running on a system that provided synthetic inputs in the form of your senses, how would you go about it? Further, how would you go about proving to someone who doubted your subjective experience was real if they doubted it? Say, if they believed they were having a dream or hallucination, or they believed you were incapable of consciousness? (people actually sometimes have to do those things) To me, if it were "undeniable" these would be much easier things to do.
  • nobody9999 4y ago
    >> That I am having a subjective experience is undeniable. >If you wanted to go about proving (even to yourself) that you are not, say, an extremely advanced ML algorithm running on a system that provided synthetic inputs in the form of your senses, how would you go about it? Not GP, but I too have come to the conclusion that I'm having a subjective experience. Let's assume that I am "an extremely advanced ML algorithm running on a system that provided synthetic inputs in the form of your senses." I'm still having a subjective experience over here -- even if it's not a "real" (whatever that means) one. >To me, if it were "undeniable" these would be much easier things to do. And that's your subjective experience. Welcome, friend. Edit: Fixed typo.
    • wizofaus 4y ago
      I'd say "I am having a subjective experience" is tautological - "subjective experience" are simply words we use to describe the state of being conscious. Though I'd agree much (most?) of it is made up of very strong illusions.
      • nobody9999 4y ago
        >I'd say "I am having a subjective experience" is tautological - "subjective experience" are simply words we use to describe the state of being conscious. Please read the comment I replied to. That should clear things up. >Though I'd agree much (most?) of it is made up of very strong illusions. Not illusions. A narrative. cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31806425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31806425
• RivieraKid 4y ago
  This is correct.
• psychoslave 4y ago
  >It is probably just a difference in semantics but for me, it seems like consciousness is the only thing that is assuredly not an illusion. It might be some bottomless, but it doesn’t look like an absolute impossibility. The classical "Brain in a vat" thought experiment gives a good insight of nothing theoretically prevent what we assume for assuredly "real" might be a virtual scenario. Or taking an other metaphor, maybe we are like cinema screens and the film of our life is all pure illusion, while the most classical interpretation would suppose that the screen itself undoubtedly "exists" – the screen being the analogous to the current conscious attention in the metaphor. But nothing prevent to wonder that the whole cinema is some kind of hologram in solid light, so while the screen does "exist", it’s nonetheless itself an illusion. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat
• layer8 4y ago
  “I’m having a subjective experience” is an interesting statement. It seems that you’re expressing that you’re experiencing having a subjective experience. Could that (first) experience be non-subjective? Is what makes the (latter) experience subjective just that it is an immediate input to your own thoughts? I personally believe that what a real explanation of subjective experience will come down to is some kind of recursivity. The brain perceives parts of its own processing. To make a loose analogy, a bit similar to a debugger or profiler observing its own execution.
  • psyc 4y ago
    This idea is often repeated (even in this thread). It sounds good, but I still haven't the slightest iota of an idea how you get from recursive strange-loopy self reflection to the experienced sensory field (sometimes "qualia"). I don't see how this idea, or anything else, gets you one tiny fraction of the way to consciousness, unless you take it as an axiom (i.e. "when you point such a network at itself in such a way, voila! you get realtime first-person subjective qualia-tastic experience"). And why should we?
    • layer8 4y ago
      See my other comment in this thread. Basically, I hold that “how some experience feels like” (qualia) is just another perceptual input into our thought process, and that there’s really nothing particularly mysterious about it. If you accept that qualia is representable in the brain, then it shouldn’t be surprising that it informs the cognitive process. It’s almost a tautology. If you disagree that this could explain your inner experience, you’d have to elaborate on what precisely is not being explained.
• roenxi 4y ago
  Deeper than that: something has to be conscious or there is nothing to debate. If they don't believe the debate is possible then the anti-conciousness arguers would automatically be unable to convince anyone. So even if consciousness doesn't exist we have to debate as though it does. For better or worse, anything beyond that is extremely deniable. Just because you believe you exist doesn't tell anyone anything. You have made a lot of mistakes in your life & maybe you're wrong about this too. The idea of separation between an external universe and a body is reasonably argued to be an illusion - so maybe the separation of 'you' from a universe wide consciousness is also an illusion/misconception bought on by evolution.