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I am still struggling with my central question (I read this to be the 'hard question') of why I am currently occupying the body that I am as an observer, and no

I am still struggling with my central question (I read this to be the 'hard question') of why I am currently occupying the body that I am as an observer, and not another one, or perhaps even none. Does anybody have some cursory reading about this subject?

bowsamic 3y ago
I'm also stuck on the same thing. Why am I me and not someone or something else? I feel like most are just going to laugh at this question as completely obvious, but for me it's almost a deep sense of angst and awe. It used to keep me up at night.
- evrimoztamur 3y ago
  I suppose I am at the beginning of asking this question out loud, and it has brought on some interesting discussions with my friends and family. Although nobody has a clear answer on this subject (globally it seems, not only in the local one I'm exploring), the variety of answers and debates it has led to has been very exciting. On the other hand, I am a bit disappointed that none has been able to bring anything more insightful than I could find via exploring the possibilities by digging around on Wikipedia. In fact, one question that I had been wondering, which is, at what point does an analogous conscious experience appear in terms of the quantum to human scale of complexity, has been asked already in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F by Thomas Nagel. I still wonder what it is like to be a planarian, or a fly on the wall of a board meeting (audio fidelity must suck).
  - cnity 3y ago
    If you haven't read any Douglas Hofstadter, do so at the earliest opportunity.
    - bowsamic 3y ago
      GEB is on my shelf, I read the long prologue, I will dig in once I'm a little further through the Silmarillion!
    - evrimoztamur 3y ago
      Sleeping on my copy of Eternal Golden Braid, and I really shouldn’t…
      - cnity 3y ago
        Based on your thoughts above, you'll definitely enjoy it!
- medstrom 3y ago
  I know this won't feel satisfactory, but there's nobody else and nothing else that you could be. Not even in principle. Your consciousness is an unique product of your brain's labor. Think of it not from the perspective of your consciousness (as if it could up and change bodies), but of your body. What other consciousness could "this body" have? No other than you.
- phito 3y ago
  It's also the question I always end up getting stuck on !
- foldr 3y ago
  It's a fascinating question, and I've long thought that it's the simplest one-sentence argument against physicalism. It's a fact that I am who I am (in the non-tautologous sense you allude to), but a complete physical description of the universe would presumably not include this fact.
  - bsza 3y ago
    It is the simplest one-sentence argument for physicalism! If consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon, then it should be no surprise that everyone with a healthy brain has one, including you. If it isn’t, then what supernatural event caused it to appear specifically in you?
    - bowsamic 3y ago
      Matter isn’t like that though. Consciousness is unique in being a phenomenon that is totally singular and unique. There are no phenomena in the physical world that aren’t considered as part of a wider collection of other physical phenomena. Eg this atom in relation to that. There is no this and that subject, there is only One. Not even getting into the fact that mental states are already non physical
      - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
        ""Consciousness is unique in being a phenomenon that is totally singular and unique"" I think the problem with the argument is that you are giving way too much credit to consciousness. You are giving an opinion on its uniqueness from the point of view of a Conscious entity that itself hasn't grasped it's own Consciousness. The really exciting part of all the latest AI tech, you can prove 'state of a neural net' is the 'state of experiencing the phenomena'. For Brains. They can now do an MRI on a brain, and re-construct what image it is thinking about. So, State of Neurons = Phenomenal Experiences. The Phenomena you are saying is not physical, is really the physical state of the brains neurons.
        bowsamic 3y ago
rodrigosetti 3y ago
Buddhism claims that our feeling of separation (and thus the multiplicity of subjective experiences) is an illusion. But I never really understood why. My hunch is that this is related to the question of why we are experiencing this particular moment in time and not another one in the past or in the future, is related. If you believe in the many words interpretation of quantum mechanics, one can also say why I’m experiencing this particular branch.
- cnity 3y ago
  I sometimes wonder if we are all basically the same conscious, threading through all of the "antennae" of life one after another. But I find this idea painful because it is tantamount to an immense cosmic loneliness.
  - Gooblebrai 3y ago
    Like in "The Egg"?
    - cnity 3y ago
      Yes, although The Egg ultimately presumes separation of consciousness at some "higher level" given that there is a dialogue between such consciousnesses. My greater sense of loneliness comes from a sense that the very premise of a separation of consciousness exists as a deliberate goal of our universe, which was made by a "God" who is actually all of us, as a means to keep myself/ourself company and to introduce love. Sort of like we are all branches of the same tree. But people talk about having epiphanies about this as if it is a good thing that we are all the same, leading to a connectedness. But it also leads to loneliness. Sorry for the dump.
      - suoduandao3 3y ago
        Loneliness is a human instinct based on our evolutionary history as social primates though - if you travel up the antennae enough that there's no 'others' there's also no evolutionary pressures to make that loneliness a source of danger. But what I find cool is that the lonely social ape can also look up the antenna and find all the security it could want - where I think some religions err is that when this happens, if you keep identifying with the insecure social ape rather than the many-antannaed-deiform it can interfere with the smooth communication between the two.
igleria 3y ago
I don't have an answer to offer, but anecdotal memories of reading somewhere that brains could be a sort of antenna for consciousness. Then a subsequent comment explaining how if that were the case we would fall unconscious in a faraday cage. so, back to square one...
- evrimoztamur 3y ago
  I wouldn't take the leap into the Faraday cage so easily, that would imply that consciousness is measurable in the electromagnetic field. I don't think that's true, otherwise we would have measured it already. I don't know where to go next on this reasoning, it seems like we don't have the tools to measure in which field we are communicating.
- suoduandao3 3y ago
  That line of reasoning seems pretty silly given that consciousness is supposed to be much more subtle than electromagnetic fluctuations and omnipresent, but it reminds me of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition where the most difficult practices are only done deep in mountain caves where no light can reach the practitioner. I wouldn't be at all surprised if minimizing cosmic background radiation was a factor in sufficiently subtle inner inquiry. One of my ancient aliens theories is that the Pyramids are artificial mountain caves.
- naasking 3y ago
  Brain antennae + consciousness is more complex than just brain consciousness. In the former, we still have to answer "so... what is consciousness then? where is it? how does it couple to the brain? can it be blocked?" In the latter, it's just "consciousness is a property of a brain", and we are only left with the question of how the brain produces it. The antenna theory is just multiplying entities unnecessarily.
jahnu 3y ago
https://www.lehigh.edu/~mhb0/Dennett-WhereAmI.pdf https://www.lehigh.edu/~mhb0/Dennett-WhereAmI.pdf
- naasking 3y ago
  Dennett is always worth a read!
bsza 3y ago
Experiments done on corpus callosotomy patients [0] give us some very interesting insights on how consciousness works. IMO, these experiments strongly point towards consciousness being mostly, if not entirely, an illusion created by the brain. [0]: https://youtu.be/ZMLzP1VCANo https://youtu.be/ZMLzP1VCANo
- Invictus0 3y ago
  Consciousness is not even really a well defined concept, so for something that's already nebulously defined to be an illusion doesn't make sense.
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    Yeah not far removed from the fungible soul concept Built from the same shaky foundation and shared desire for it to exist One hit upside the head and you’re a completely different person. (Or dietary change with different microbacteria, or following heavy psychedelics use, etc…)
    - consumer451 3y ago
      > Yeah not far removed from the fungible soul concept I am with you on this. Today's scientific debate about consciousness sounds a lot like the scientific debate about the human soul from a century ago. We just want to be special so badly, meanwhile evidence keeps piling up indicating that we are not.
      - xcode42 3y ago
        I would love nothing more than to not be special, the only solutions that I can conceive of for the hard problem of conscience are ones that requires something other than the physical. Either there is a soul or conscience is just inherent to the universe(the whole everything has a conscience theory) neither of these is particularly satisfying to me if for no other reason than they are both unfalsifiable. I would love for there to be an available algorithm that my brain could compute that would spit out conscience. But I don't see how, it seems intractable to me. The brain could theoretically do anything it does from information processing, problem solving, planning or even develop a theory of the mind without a conscience, it's computation all the way down. But why and goddamned how does a human brain go from perceiving and processing the visual information of red light hitting your eyes to "feeling" red, how does it "feel" anything at all, heck what is this "observer" that does all the "feeling" even made of? if you could break "him" down into constituent parts(theoretically computable sub-problems) at all that would be nice, it would be more progress than I've done over years of thinking about this bullshit problem. The "observer" seems indivisible to me, heck it seems made of nothing at all, it just is. Sure it being indivisible might be an illusion made up by the brain, but, if so, it's an illusion that still needs to be fed to "something", and I haven't heard any working theories that I actually buy that explain how the brain comes up with that "something".
eternauta3k 3y ago
Maybe your consciousness does sometimes occupy other bodies. Of course you don't remember it, because memory and working memory are tied to brains. When consciousness is in another body, it feels that it is another person with his memories and context and none of yours. Another way of saying this is that there's no need to postulate separate consciousness for separate people, one is enough.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
Don't worry, this has been the central question of humanity forever. It's also likely unanswerable by the scientific method.
- Arjuna144 3y ago
  I feel that if one does not have the patience to wait, one may just go and selfexperiment. It is not, that Consciousness is in a lab somewhere where only some scientists have access, no it is right here! It is so much in our faces that we do not explore it ourselves, but rather wait for some "authorities" to explore that for us. No! We can explore it by calming our mind and our senses with well established methods which are known for thousands of years (the ancient tradition of yoga for example, an do not think twisting and bending, no this goes MUCH further!!) And then, when the senses are turned of (by practice or "outside help" e.g. think tank) and the mind is silenced, then we start to explore what lies beneath!! They say: "When all the movements in the mind have ceased to exist, the knower dwells in his real nature" (or something along the lines, in the Yoga Sutras, roughly 1500 to 2000 years old )
Arjuna144 3y ago
I know this is a disliked point of view, but for me the yogic point of view really gave me a mental picture in which this all makes perfect sense and which is quite consistent in itself (even though there is an unexplained axiom which is: "Intelligent-Awareness just is") I feel that is what was termed the dreadful g-o-d word by many cultures but if we can understand this under that light, the readings of the second ever yogi that came to the west called Paramhansa Yogananda are highly recommended. His Autobiography of a Yogi was Steve Jobs favorite book and he made everyone that attended his funeral to get a copy of it. Not that that means a whole lot, as he was by far not an embodiment of love, but I feel he had the capacity to see the brilliance in this undestanding.
suoduandao3 3y ago
I quite like Penrose-Hameroff's theory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGbgDf4HCHU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGbgDf4HCHU My best summary of it: consciousness is primal, every bit of matter has perspective, every interaction has experience, the body you're 'occupying' is having a particularly complex and long-lived experience. As for your question of why this one, well, someone's got to be having this one. As for why not another, there's no saying 'you' won't have another 'after' this experience ends, but if 'you' had them in a perfectly undifferentiated way that'd be a different experience again, and as stated, someone's got to be having this one.
- Arjuna144 3y ago
  This!! It all comes together. What the mystics have figured out through deepest self-introspection and meditation comes so close to our modern understanding derived by physics, biology and neuroscience. It is fascinating to see how these understandings converge.
Vox_Leone 3y ago
The question you raise is fascinating. I ask the same questions when I think about the many-worlds interpretation in QM. As for the research in focus in this thread, It seems that we are facing another Great Humiliation[0], with the potential to affect the course of development in so many other areas. It will be interesting to see what developments this research will inspire in the cultural/anthropological field: so were the tree-huggers right all along? So is there really a harmony and connection between all the "children of Gaia"? :) [0]https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/copernicus-darwin-and-freud-a-tale-of-science-and-narcissism/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/copernicus-...
naasking 3y ago
> why I am currently occupying the body that I am as an observer, and not another one, or perhaps even none. Are you sure this is a well-formed question? To be clear, this isn't what the hard problem of consciousness is about, although perhaps that's what you meant by "none".
chronofar 3y ago
Materialism, which by my reading has the most evidence going for it, solves these particular questions rather easily. Your experience as an observer is the result of your brain. It's not another one or none b/c those aren't your particular brains. This doesn't solve the "hard" problem, it's still quite mysterious how exactly and at what point neuronal mappings become sentient, but it does leave you without having to wonder the particular questions you asked there.
- wry_discontent 3y ago
  This seems like a common way that to me completely side steps the actual question. Sure, your brain powers intelligence, but nothing we have nothing on how it could create awareness, which seems qualitatively different.
  - chronofar 3y ago
    Completely sidesteps which question? It answers very clearly these questions posed by the person I was responding to: > why I am currently occupying the body that I am as an observer, and not another one, or perhaps even none. It definitely does not answer the "hard" problem of consciousness, which is what you're alluding to and which I specifically and explicitly said it didn't answer.
    - evrimoztamur 3y ago
      I referred to the hard question in my OP, and I don’t think that materialism answers either of the question’s formulation. Materialism may answer it at one point, and I would be very impressed if it does, because it is going to require perhaps new mathematics, geometry, and physics for us to get there. So far, none of our tools for measurement of any form of field has led us any closer to answering the hard question.
      - chronofar 3y ago
        Yes I noted it doesn't answer the "hard" problem explicitly in both of my replies here on this thread. Indeed, the very reason it is called the "hard" problem is b/c it very well seems perhaps unsolvable (though this is certainly debatable, but this is the very etymology of the term). Your actual stated questions (why am I me and not someone else, etc) are in no way part of the "hard" problem's formulation, and are indeed easily answered by materialism as I noted. Perhaps take a look at the wiki article on the hard problem: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
exitb 3y ago
If you assume that the observer can "occupy" a body, rather than be a body, you have to conclude that the memories are part of the body, not the observer. You assume that you occupy the "correct" body, because your present experience matches your memories, but that'd be true even if you moved to occupy another body. Moreover, how do you know that there isn't more than one observer in your body? Or maybe there's just one observer sharing all the bodies?
- evrimoztamur 3y ago
  To answer your last to questions: I don’t know! And those formulations are simply, in my opinion, rhetorical variations of the hard questions too. One observer many bodies or many observers one body are equally valid possibilities, as far as I can tell, and I am not referring to split personality disorders or a collective external memory for that matter. It’s genuinely one of the most fascinating questions out there for me right now!
zackmorris 3y ago
The only "scientific" explanation that makes sense to me is that consciousness spans time and space, where each focal point of attention is an aspect of a central whole, like a lifetime within a fractal of lifetimes stemming from when source (God) consciousness fractured itself to experience every viewpoint within the universe to avoid an eternity alone. It created what we experience as the shared (objective) reality from the original singularity that came into existence from the number line via the long tail of the quantum probability distribution. The concept of something from nothing is maybe the foundation of consciousness itself, since science may never be able to explain the subjective experience of conscious awareness or how it came to be. As a thought experiment, imagine we could emulate the corpus callosum between brain hemispheres through a computer chip, and had the medical technology to split someone in half. There have been cases where people have lost a brain hemisphere before birth or due to an accident but continued leading relatively normal lives, so we know that such a division is plausible. Before separation, we'd experience being an individual. At the moment of separation, our consciousness would anchor to one of the hemispheres we'll call "A". We'd see our other half "B" pull away and look back at us in curiosity as it continues experiencing its own consciousness. The other half B is still our consciousness, but anchored to a different point in spacetime. The halves would begin accruing their own memories independently, but act like the original individual for quite some time or even a lifetime. At the moment of reunification, we'd see B approaching and then experience a download where our memories suddenly contain more than they did a moment ago. We might even experience "hearing" the other half as another person until the merging is complete. But afterwards we'd still be the same individual we always were, just with new narratives running in the code of our mental model, built from the memories acquired while separated. This experience is identical for the other half, except seen from its own context. Warning (spoilers): This is analogous to a Vulcan mind meld, although it's unclear from Star Trek whether minds maintain their individuality or become a single consciousness. Because Spock's consciousness existed separately within McCoy until he was reincarnated, I tend to think that the show took the society of mind approach where our thoughts maybe come from a collection of simpler agents, meaning that Spock's anchor transferred to McCoy when they separated, so both their anchors shared one mind for a time, and Spock would have been in McCoy while he was asleep and his partial (a term borrowed from Eon by Greg Bear) B died in the warp chamber. But I think the hemisphere splitting thought experiment is more useful because it sheds insight on reincarnation and the multiverse. It also helps us step up to 4D/5D and consider what it subjectively feels like to straddle realities as we shift laterally through spacetime rather than waiting for events to unfold in forward (linear) time. Insight and downloads might come from our consciousness constantly splitting and reuniting from other timelines as it explores possible future outcomes in the quantum probability distribution. That might shed light on how the inner mind seemingly affects outer reality by overcoming the odds to survive via affecting probability itself (the principle of manifestation). In other words, it's likely that there is always an anchor, since quantum reality can't exist without an observer (consciousness), so an individual sees unlikely events whose odds of happening are so remote that science can only call them coincidences (synchronicities). That would mean that our souls always continue, even if our physical bodies die, by straddling another reality where a body for us still exists. We may experience an infinite, continuous, individual timeline spanning countless lifetimes over billions of years, interspersed with long periods of nonexistence that we have no way to remember. And each time we die, the people around us can no longer be with us, since our anchor is no longer in their reality. And it's unclear whether our soul can reincarnate in simpler life forms or if our complexity keeps evolving as our soul ascends. Dreams and psychedelic accounts seem to lean towards the idea of a lizard brain, where consciousness can exist unfiltered. So that it may be that we are allowed to "choose" our next incarnation during unconscious periods and "opt in" to a 3D experience like here on Earth to experience the novelty of suffering. The main takeaway is that since those around us are aspects of ourselves, then egocentric narcisism is a refusal to see the big picture. If we act to enrich ourselves by exploiting others, we karmically doom ourselves to more suffering in our next life. Our old A becomes the resource-hoarding enemy of our new B. Making a deal with the devil may feel good, but it's like being the top inmate in a prison, starving the soul of real connection. So the meek and pious spiral out towards peace/connection/heaven while the rich and powerful spiral in towards their own violence/loneliness/hell. I haven't read this, but I think it leans more towards the objective side, where multiple consciousnessness would occupy a single mind, more like schizophrenia than a fractal split from a single source consciousness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind And of course all of this could be completely wrong. But it's all derived from first principles and a collection of insights from the spiritual community that seem to keep resonating and expanding in this post-pandemic era entering the New Age. We may not know until we meet aliens who have performed these experiments. But it provides a useful framework to explore the idea of consciousness existing in higher dimensions and even visiting us through the paranormal/supernatural (magical) experiences we all have as conscious aware beings. Another benefit is that consciousness affecting probablity means that time travel is not possible, since any repeat scenario is a copy of the original and subject to random outcomes. The same events can never be replayed exactly the same way twice. Many vocal people in the scientific community have arrived at the conclusion that free will doesn't exist, which self-evidently defies our subjective experience, but they're basing that on the fallacy that time travel is possible. The impossibility of time travel is maybe the best (albiet weak) explanation we have for consciousness and free will. It's how our timeless nature steps down from 4D/5D to experience a timeline, similarly to how a photon doesn't experience time since it's moving at the speed of light. There may only be one photon in the whole universe, creating a 4D holographic "crystal" encoding everything here. The mutable state of our consciousness is kind of like the in-between times when pure functional programming blocks to wait for new input, with the deterministic portion running unconsciously. An android would have mutable state, while a robot would mostly run hardcoded logic. Which is why I don't subscribe to the idea that humans are just AIs running in complex robots, or that this is a simulation. Although if we substitute the word dream instead, then it all begins to make sense again. There's no matrix or holodeck that created the simulation, it's more like source consciousness projects the simulation to give us something to do. And of course there's no way to prove any of this, it's just a descriptive model that may lead to deeper insights.
cobber2005 3y ago
I like the idea of ‘individuation’[0] where individual things (rocks, living bodies, minds, societies) come into being from their preindividual environment. As I understand this idea, it is just that a mind individuates within a body, and that mind comes to call itself ‘I’. So it’s not that we existed before a mind individuated, but rather we come to find ourself recognizing ourself as ‘I’ after individuating. [0] https://epochemagazine.org/40/on-psychic-and-collective-individuation-from-simondon-to-stiegler/ https://epochemagazine.org/40/on-psychic-and-collective-indi...

bowsamic 3y ago

I'm also stuck on the same thing. Why am I me and not someone or something else? I feel like most are just going to laugh at this question as completely obvious, but for me it's almost a deep sense of angst and awe. It used to keep me up at night.

evrimoztamur 3y ago
I suppose I am at the beginning of asking this question out loud, and it has brought on some interesting discussions with my friends and family. Although nobody has a clear answer on this subject (globally it seems, not only in the local one I'm exploring), the variety of answers and debates it has led to has been very exciting. On the other hand, I am a bit disappointed that none has been able to bring anything more insightful than I could find via exploring the possibilities by digging around on Wikipedia. In fact, one question that I had been wondering, which is, at what point does an analogous conscious experience appear in terms of the quantum to human scale of complexity, has been asked already in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F by Thomas Nagel. I still wonder what it is like to be a planarian, or a fly on the wall of a board meeting (audio fidelity must suck).
- cnity 3y ago
  If you haven't read any Douglas Hofstadter, do so at the earliest opportunity.
  - bowsamic 3y ago
    GEB is on my shelf, I read the long prologue, I will dig in once I'm a little further through the Silmarillion!
  - evrimoztamur 3y ago
    Sleeping on my copy of Eternal Golden Braid, and I really shouldn’t…
    - cnity 3y ago
      Based on your thoughts above, you'll definitely enjoy it!
medstrom 3y ago
I know this won't feel satisfactory, but there's nobody else and nothing else that you could be. Not even in principle. Your consciousness is an unique product of your brain's labor. Think of it not from the perspective of your consciousness (as if it could up and change bodies), but of your body. What other consciousness could "this body" have? No other than you.
phito 3y ago
It's also the question I always end up getting stuck on !
foldr 3y ago
It's a fascinating question, and I've long thought that it's the simplest one-sentence argument against physicalism. It's a fact that I am who I am (in the non-tautologous sense you allude to), but a complete physical description of the universe would presumably not include this fact.
- bsza 3y ago
  It is the simplest one-sentence argument for physicalism! If consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon, then it should be no surprise that everyone with a healthy brain has one, including you. If it isn’t, then what supernatural event caused it to appear specifically in you?
  - bowsamic 3y ago
    Matter isn’t like that though. Consciousness is unique in being a phenomenon that is totally singular and unique. There are no phenomena in the physical world that aren’t considered as part of a wider collection of other physical phenomena. Eg this atom in relation to that. There is no this and that subject, there is only One. Not even getting into the fact that mental states are already non physical
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      ""Consciousness is unique in being a phenomenon that is totally singular and unique"" I think the problem with the argument is that you are giving way too much credit to consciousness. You are giving an opinion on its uniqueness from the point of view of a Conscious entity that itself hasn't grasped it's own Consciousness. The really exciting part of all the latest AI tech, you can prove 'state of a neural net' is the 'state of experiencing the phenomena'. For Brains. They can now do an MRI on a brain, and re-construct what image it is thinking about. So, State of Neurons = Phenomenal Experiences. The Phenomena you are saying is not physical, is really the physical state of the brains neurons.
      - bowsamic 3y ago

rodrigosetti 3y ago

Buddhism claims that our feeling of separation (and thus the multiplicity of subjective experiences) is an illusion. But I never really understood why. My hunch is that this is related to the question of why we are experiencing this particular moment in time and not another one in the past or in the future, is related. If you believe in the many words interpretation of quantum mechanics, one can also say why I’m experiencing this particular branch.

cnity 3y ago
I sometimes wonder if we are all basically the same conscious, threading through all of the "antennae" of life one after another. But I find this idea painful because it is tantamount to an immense cosmic loneliness.
- Gooblebrai 3y ago
  Like in "The Egg"?
  - cnity 3y ago
    Yes, although The Egg ultimately presumes separation of consciousness at some "higher level" given that there is a dialogue between such consciousnesses. My greater sense of loneliness comes from a sense that the very premise of a separation of consciousness exists as a deliberate goal of our universe, which was made by a "God" who is actually all of us, as a means to keep myself/ourself company and to introduce love. Sort of like we are all branches of the same tree. But people talk about having epiphanies about this as if it is a good thing that we are all the same, leading to a connectedness. But it also leads to loneliness. Sorry for the dump.
    - suoduandao3 3y ago
      Loneliness is a human instinct based on our evolutionary history as social primates though - if you travel up the antennae enough that there's no 'others' there's also no evolutionary pressures to make that loneliness a source of danger. But what I find cool is that the lonely social ape can also look up the antenna and find all the security it could want - where I think some religions err is that when this happens, if you keep identifying with the insecure social ape rather than the many-antannaed-deiform it can interfere with the smooth communication between the two.

igleria 3y ago

I don't have an answer to offer, but anecdotal memories of reading somewhere that brains could be a sort of antenna for consciousness. Then a subsequent comment explaining how if that were the case we would fall unconscious in a faraday cage. so, back to square one...

evrimoztamur 3y ago
I wouldn't take the leap into the Faraday cage so easily, that would imply that consciousness is measurable in the electromagnetic field. I don't think that's true, otherwise we would have measured it already. I don't know where to go next on this reasoning, it seems like we don't have the tools to measure in which field we are communicating.
suoduandao3 3y ago
That line of reasoning seems pretty silly given that consciousness is supposed to be much more subtle than electromagnetic fluctuations and omnipresent, but it reminds me of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition where the most difficult practices are only done deep in mountain caves where no light can reach the practitioner. I wouldn't be at all surprised if minimizing cosmic background radiation was a factor in sufficiently subtle inner inquiry. One of my ancient aliens theories is that the Pyramids are artificial mountain caves.
naasking 3y ago
Brain antennae + consciousness is more complex than just brain consciousness. In the former, we still have to answer "so... what is consciousness then? where is it? how does it couple to the brain? can it be blocked?" In the latter, it's just "consciousness is a property of a brain", and we are only left with the question of how the brain produces it. The antenna theory is just multiplying entities unnecessarily.

jahnu 3y ago

https://www.lehigh.edu/~mhb0/Dennett-WhereAmI.pdf https://www.lehigh.edu/~mhb0/Dennett-WhereAmI.pdf

naasking 3y ago
Dennett is always worth a read!

bsza 3y ago

Experiments done on corpus callosotomy patients [0] give us some very interesting insights on how consciousness works. IMO, these experiments strongly point towards consciousness being mostly, if not entirely, an illusion created by the brain. [0]: https://youtu.be/ZMLzP1VCANo https://youtu.be/ZMLzP1VCANo

Invictus0 3y ago
Consciousness is not even really a well defined concept, so for something that's already nebulously defined to be an illusion doesn't make sense.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  Yeah not far removed from the fungible soul concept Built from the same shaky foundation and shared desire for it to exist One hit upside the head and you’re a completely different person. (Or dietary change with different microbacteria, or following heavy psychedelics use, etc…)
  - consumer451 3y ago
    > Yeah not far removed from the fungible soul concept I am with you on this. Today's scientific debate about consciousness sounds a lot like the scientific debate about the human soul from a century ago. We just want to be special so badly, meanwhile evidence keeps piling up indicating that we are not.
    - xcode42 3y ago
      I would love nothing more than to not be special, the only solutions that I can conceive of for the hard problem of conscience are ones that requires something other than the physical. Either there is a soul or conscience is just inherent to the universe(the whole everything has a conscience theory) neither of these is particularly satisfying to me if for no other reason than they are both unfalsifiable. I would love for there to be an available algorithm that my brain could compute that would spit out conscience. But I don't see how, it seems intractable to me. The brain could theoretically do anything it does from information processing, problem solving, planning or even develop a theory of the mind without a conscience, it's computation all the way down. But why and goddamned how does a human brain go from perceiving and processing the visual information of red light hitting your eyes to "feeling" red, how does it "feel" anything at all, heck what is this "observer" that does all the "feeling" even made of? if you could break "him" down into constituent parts(theoretically computable sub-problems) at all that would be nice, it would be more progress than I've done over years of thinking about this bullshit problem. The "observer" seems indivisible to me, heck it seems made of nothing at all, it just is. Sure it being indivisible might be an illusion made up by the brain, but, if so, it's an illusion that still needs to be fed to "something", and I haven't heard any working theories that I actually buy that explain how the brain comes up with that "something".

eternauta3k 3y ago

Maybe your consciousness does sometimes occupy other bodies. Of course you don't remember it, because memory and working memory are tied to brains. When consciousness is in another body, it feels that it is another person with his memories and context and none of yours. Another way of saying this is that there's no need to postulate separate consciousness for separate people, one is enough.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

Don't worry, this has been the central question of humanity forever. It's also likely unanswerable by the scientific method.

Arjuna144 3y ago
I feel that if one does not have the patience to wait, one may just go and selfexperiment. It is not, that Consciousness is in a lab somewhere where only some scientists have access, no it is right here! It is so much in our faces that we do not explore it ourselves, but rather wait for some "authorities" to explore that for us. No! We can explore it by calming our mind and our senses with well established methods which are known for thousands of years (the ancient tradition of yoga for example, an do not think twisting and bending, no this goes MUCH further!!) And then, when the senses are turned of (by practice or "outside help" e.g. think tank) and the mind is silenced, then we start to explore what lies beneath!! They say: "When all the movements in the mind have ceased to exist, the knower dwells in his real nature" (or something along the lines, in the Yoga Sutras, roughly 1500 to 2000 years old )

Arjuna144 3y ago

I know this is a disliked point of view, but for me the yogic point of view really gave me a mental picture in which this all makes perfect sense and which is quite consistent in itself (even though there is an unexplained axiom which is: "Intelligent-Awareness just is") I feel that is what was termed the dreadful g-o-d word by many cultures but if we can understand this under that light, the readings of the second ever yogi that came to the west called Paramhansa Yogananda are highly recommended. His Autobiography of a Yogi was Steve Jobs favorite book and he made everyone that attended his funeral to get a copy of it. Not that that means a whole lot, as he was by far not an embodiment of love, but I feel he had the capacity to see the brilliance in this undestanding.

suoduandao3 3y ago

I quite like Penrose-Hameroff's theory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGbgDf4HCHU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGbgDf4HCHU My best summary of it: consciousness is primal, every bit of matter has perspective, every interaction has experience, the body you're 'occupying' is having a particularly complex and long-lived experience. As for your question of why this one, well, someone's got to be having this one. As for why not another, there's no saying 'you' won't have another 'after' this experience ends, but if 'you' had them in a perfectly undifferentiated way that'd be a different experience again, and as stated, someone's got to be having this one.

Arjuna144 3y ago
This!! It all comes together. What the mystics have figured out through deepest self-introspection and meditation comes so close to our modern understanding derived by physics, biology and neuroscience. It is fascinating to see how these understandings converge.

Vox_Leone 3y ago

The question you raise is fascinating. I ask the same questions when I think about the many-worlds interpretation in QM. As for the research in focus in this thread, It seems that we are facing another Great Humiliation[0], with the potential to affect the course of development in so many other areas. It will be interesting to see what developments this research will inspire in the cultural/anthropological field: so were the tree-huggers right all along? So is there really a harmony and connection between all the "children of Gaia"? :) [0]https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/copernicus-darwin-and-freud-a-tale-of-science-and-narcissism/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/copernicus-...

naasking 3y ago

> why I am currently occupying the body that I am as an observer, and not another one, or perhaps even none. Are you sure this is a well-formed question? To be clear, this isn't what the hard problem of consciousness is about, although perhaps that's what you meant by "none".

chronofar 3y ago

Materialism, which by my reading has the most evidence going for it, solves these particular questions rather easily. Your experience as an observer is the result of your brain. It's not another one or none b/c those aren't your particular brains. This doesn't solve the "hard" problem, it's still quite mysterious how exactly and at what point neuronal mappings become sentient, but it does leave you without having to wonder the particular questions you asked there.

wry_discontent 3y ago
This seems like a common way that to me completely side steps the actual question. Sure, your brain powers intelligence, but nothing we have nothing on how it could create awareness, which seems qualitatively different.
- chronofar 3y ago
  Completely sidesteps which question? It answers very clearly these questions posed by the person I was responding to: > why I am currently occupying the body that I am as an observer, and not another one, or perhaps even none. It definitely does not answer the "hard" problem of consciousness, which is what you're alluding to and which I specifically and explicitly said it didn't answer.
  - evrimoztamur 3y ago
    I referred to the hard question in my OP, and I don’t think that materialism answers either of the question’s formulation. Materialism may answer it at one point, and I would be very impressed if it does, because it is going to require perhaps new mathematics, geometry, and physics for us to get there. So far, none of our tools for measurement of any form of field has led us any closer to answering the hard question.
    - chronofar 3y ago
      Yes I noted it doesn't answer the "hard" problem explicitly in both of my replies here on this thread. Indeed, the very reason it is called the "hard" problem is b/c it very well seems perhaps unsolvable (though this is certainly debatable, but this is the very etymology of the term). Your actual stated questions (why am I me and not someone else, etc) are in no way part of the "hard" problem's formulation, and are indeed easily answered by materialism as I noted. Perhaps take a look at the wiki article on the hard problem: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

exitb 3y ago

If you assume that the observer can "occupy" a body, rather than be a body, you have to conclude that the memories are part of the body, not the observer. You assume that you occupy the "correct" body, because your present experience matches your memories, but that'd be true even if you moved to occupy another body. Moreover, how do you know that there isn't more than one observer in your body? Or maybe there's just one observer sharing all the bodies?

evrimoztamur 3y ago
To answer your last to questions: I don’t know! And those formulations are simply, in my opinion, rhetorical variations of the hard questions too. One observer many bodies or many observers one body are equally valid possibilities, as far as I can tell, and I am not referring to split personality disorders or a collective external memory for that matter. It’s genuinely one of the most fascinating questions out there for me right now!

zackmorris 3y ago

The only "scientific" explanation that makes sense to me is that consciousness spans time and space, where each focal point of attention is an aspect of a central whole, like a lifetime within a fractal of lifetimes stemming from when source (God) consciousness fractured itself to experience every viewpoint within the universe to avoid an eternity alone. It created what we experience as the shared (objective) reality from the original singularity that came into existence from the number line via the long tail of the quantum probability distribution. The concept of something from nothing is maybe the foundation of consciousness itself, since science may never be able to explain the subjective experience of conscious awareness or how it came to be. As a thought experiment, imagine we could emulate the corpus callosum between brain hemispheres through a computer chip, and had the medical technology to split someone in half. There have been cases where people have lost a brain hemisphere before birth or due to an accident but continued leading relatively normal lives, so we know that such a division is plausible. Before separation, we'd experience being an individual. At the moment of separation, our consciousness would anchor to one of the hemispheres we'll call "A". We'd see our other half "B" pull away and look back at us in curiosity as it continues experiencing its own consciousness. The other half B is still our consciousness, but anchored to a different point in spacetime. The halves would begin accruing their own memories independently, but act like the original individual for quite some time or even a lifetime. At the moment of reunification, we'd see B approaching and then experience a download where our memories suddenly contain more than they did a moment ago. We might even experience "hearing" the other half as another person until the merging is complete. But afterwards we'd still be the same individual we always were, just with new narratives running in the code of our mental model, built from the memories acquired while separated. This experience is identical for the other half, except seen from its own context. Warning (spoilers): This is analogous to a Vulcan mind meld, although it's unclear from Star Trek whether minds maintain their individuality or become a single consciousness. Because Spock's consciousness existed separately within McCoy until he was reincarnated, I tend to think that the show took the society of mind approach where our thoughts maybe come from a collection of simpler agents, meaning that Spock's anchor transferred to McCoy when they separated, so both their anchors shared one mind for a time, and Spock would have been in McCoy while he was asleep and his partial (a term borrowed from Eon by Greg Bear) B died in the warp chamber. But I think the hemisphere splitting thought experiment is more useful because it sheds insight on reincarnation and the multiverse. It also helps us step up to 4D/5D and consider what it subjectively feels like to straddle realities as we shift laterally through spacetime rather than waiting for events to unfold in forward (linear) time. Insight and downloads might come from our consciousness constantly splitting and reuniting from other timelines as it explores possible future outcomes in the quantum probability distribution. That might shed light on how the inner mind seemingly affects outer reality by overcoming the odds to survive via affecting probability itself (the principle of manifestation). In other words, it's likely that there is always an anchor, since quantum reality can't exist without an observer (consciousness), so an individual sees unlikely events whose odds of happening are so remote that science can only call them coincidences (synchronicities). That would mean that our souls always continue, even if our physical bodies die, by straddling another reality where a body for us still exists. We may experience an infinite, continuous, individual timeline spanning countless lifetimes over billions of years, interspersed with long periods of nonexistence that we have no way to remember. And each time we die, the people around us can no longer be with us, since our anchor is no longer in their reality. And it's unclear whether our soul can reincarnate in simpler life forms or if our complexity keeps evolving as our soul ascends. Dreams and psychedelic accounts seem to lean towards the idea of a lizard brain, where consciousness can exist unfiltered. So that it may be that we are allowed to "choose" our next incarnation during unconscious periods and "opt in" to a 3D experience like here on Earth to experience the novelty of suffering. The main takeaway is that since those around us are aspects of ourselves, then egocentric narcisism is a refusal to see the big picture. If we act to enrich ourselves by exploiting others, we karmically doom ourselves to more suffering in our next life. Our old A becomes the resource-hoarding enemy of our new B. Making a deal with the devil may feel good, but it's like being the top inmate in a prison, starving the soul of real connection. So the meek and pious spiral out towards peace/connection/heaven while the rich and powerful spiral in towards their own violence/loneliness/hell. I haven't read this, but I think it leans more towards the objective side, where multiple consciousnessness would occupy a single mind, more like schizophrenia than a fractal split from a single source consciousness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind And of course all of this could be completely wrong. But it's all derived from first principles and a collection of insights from the spiritual community that seem to keep resonating and expanding in this post-pandemic era entering the New Age. We may not know until we meet aliens who have performed these experiments. But it provides a useful framework to explore the idea of consciousness existing in higher dimensions and even visiting us through the paranormal/supernatural (magical) experiences we all have as conscious aware beings. Another benefit is that consciousness affecting probablity means that time travel is not possible, since any repeat scenario is a copy of the original and subject to random outcomes. The same events can never be replayed exactly the same way twice. Many vocal people in the scientific community have arrived at the conclusion that free will doesn't exist, which self-evidently defies our subjective experience, but they're basing that on the fallacy that time travel is possible. The impossibility of time travel is maybe the best (albiet weak) explanation we have for consciousness and free will. It's how our timeless nature steps down from 4D/5D to experience a timeline, similarly to how a photon doesn't experience time since it's moving at the speed of light. There may only be one photon in the whole universe, creating a 4D holographic "crystal" encoding everything here. The mutable state of our consciousness is kind of like the in-between times when pure functional programming blocks to wait for new input, with the deterministic portion running unconsciously. An android would have mutable state, while a robot would mostly run hardcoded logic. Which is why I don't subscribe to the idea that humans are just AIs running in complex robots, or that this is a simulation. Although if we substitute the word dream instead, then it all begins to make sense again. There's no matrix or holodeck that created the simulation, it's more like source consciousness projects the simulation to give us something to do. And of course there's no way to prove any of this, it's just a descriptive model that may lead to deeper insights.

cobber2005 3y ago

I like the idea of ‘individuation’[0] where individual things (rocks, living bodies, minds, societies) come into being from their preindividual environment. As I understand this idea, it is just that a mind individuates within a body, and that mind comes to call itself ‘I’. So it’s not that we existed before a mind individuated, but rather we come to find ourself recognizing ourself as ‘I’ after individuating. [0] https://epochemagazine.org/40/on-psychic-and-collective-individuation-from-simondon-to-stiegler/ https://epochemagazine.org/40/on-psychic-and-collective-indi...