4 ms·

I have a really hard time grasping what consciousness truly is. Why is it so that our brain processing information the way it does it causes us to experience th

by harha_ 4y ago

I have a really hard time grasping what consciousness truly is. Why is it so that our brain processing information the way it does it causes us to experience the world around us. Who am I to be born in here, to experience my life, what makes the matter that constructs my brain "special" to manifest this consciousness? After all it's just information being processed using certain molecular structures, how does it differ from any other kind of information processing system, eg. a computer.

hnfong 4y ago
You posed lots of questions that I don't know the answer to, but I can comment on these: > what makes the matter that constructs my brain "special" to manifest this consciousness? > how does it differ from any other kind of information processing system, eg. a computer. Maybe entertain the idea that your brain is not special, and your computer has a consciousness too? Not human consciousness, but some kind of different consciousness. Ancient spiritual teachings have claimed that everything in nature has a consciousness or at least a "spirit". There's no reason why something as complex as a modern computer (esp. with software) wouldn't have one. On the other side, you could take the stance that nothing is conscious at all (except perhaps you yourself), and every human is just a zombie-like automaton. After all, there's no hard evidence that other people are conscious except that we all look the same (or similar enough) from the outside.
- yomly 4y ago
  emergent behaviour in complex systems is still reasonably simple, (eg OpenOffice won't print on a Tuesday [0] or moving my mouse makes Windows faster [1]) but maybe that makes it easier for us to appreciate how behaviour can emerge from distal properties interacting in a system. LLMs like ChatGPT will bring this to a whole new level. I'm not insinuating that ChatGPT is conscious but I think it definitely advances discussions on what you are calling a "spirit" [0] https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/print_on_tuesday.html https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/print_on_tuesday.html [1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why-did-moving-the-mouse-cursor-cause-windows-95-to-run-more-quickly https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why...

by harha_ 4y ago

hnfong 4y ago

You posed lots of questions that I don't know the answer to, but I can comment on these: > what makes the matter that constructs my brain "special" to manifest this consciousness? > how does it differ from any other kind of information processing system, eg. a computer. Maybe entertain the idea that your brain is not special, and your computer has a consciousness too? Not human consciousness, but some kind of different consciousness. Ancient spiritual teachings have claimed that everything in nature has a consciousness or at least a "spirit". There's no reason why something as complex as a modern computer (esp. with software) wouldn't have one. On the other side, you could take the stance that nothing is conscious at all (except perhaps you yourself), and every human is just a zombie-like automaton. After all, there's no hard evidence that other people are conscious except that we all look the same (or similar enough) from the outside.

yomly 4y ago
emergent behaviour in complex systems is still reasonably simple, (eg OpenOffice won't print on a Tuesday [0] or moving my mouse makes Windows faster [1]) but maybe that makes it easier for us to appreciate how behaviour can emerge from distal properties interacting in a system. LLMs like ChatGPT will bring this to a whole new level. I'm not insinuating that ChatGPT is conscious but I think it definitely advances discussions on what you are calling a "spirit" [0] https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/print_on_tuesday.html https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/print_on_tuesday.html [1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why-did-moving-the-mouse-cursor-cause-windows-95-to-run-more-quickly https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why...