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Consciousness is the only thing that can not possibly be an illusion. Whenever this comes up I have to wonder if half the people are secretly p-zombies and act

Consciousness is the only thing that can not possibly be an illusion. Whenever this comes up I have to wonder if half the people are secretly p-zombies and actually genuinely aren't sure whether consciousness is an illusion because they've never experienced it? I know that's not a very charitable take but I just can't see how any conscious being could imagine that consciousness could be an illusion! Consciousness isn't the illusion, consciousness is the audience!

pcthrowaway 2y ago
The person above meant "the persistence of consciousness" Yes, we are conscious (or at least I am, I'm assuming y'all are too). But consciousness isn't static. My consciousness today is not my consciousness of 5 years ago.
- sage92 2y ago
  Begs the question: by what metric are you using to track the change/staticity? I don’t see how one can concretely come to the conclusion of whether it changes or stays the same, when the presence of consciousness itself is a prerequisite of making that very claim
  - pcthrowaway 2y ago
    Well if you believe there's something magical about consciousness I could see why you'd believe the same person's consciousness at different points in time is the same consciousness. If you believe consciousness is a function of sentience and self-awareness, and presumably that AI can one day be conscious (not saying it is right now), then I don't see how you can believe consciousness is persistent. If the AI is copied/moved to a different server, is it the same consciousness? Or in Star Trek when you get beamed up are you the same consciousness?
    - sage92 2y ago
      Safe to say you tend to lean towards your second presentation of consciousness. I tend to lean towards the idea that conscious is akin to a field in the sense of an electron field - that what we can measure are simply “excitations” of a more subtle field. Not a perfect metaphor, but it’s the closest thing to what matches my meditative experiences. IMO, it’s illogical for me to let another subjective being define what my substrate is, so I primarily rely on meditation and then supplement with objective observations. All in all it really depends on what you define as consciousness. The issue that I have with most “objective” interpretations of consciousness is that we can only measure the excitations of this mysterious “life” thing is. If there is more to us than can be measured, e.g, that there are first person experiences that can be felt subjectively but not measured objectively, then any objective measure of consciousness will likely be limited. Consciousness seems from my pov to be the Achilles heal of the axiomatic assumptions of our scientific paradigm (at least in the west) In response to your question, it depends on your definition of consciousness. Is neural activity the source of consciousness, or is neural activity the result of consciousness? How can we know for sure which?
  - jhanschoo 2y ago
    The me who is engrossed in a conversation with a peer over dinner at night focusing on the topic at hand surely is a different consciousness as the me fighting to stay awake just after lunch. They think and emotionally experience very different things.
deepsun 2y ago
"Blindsight" by Peter Watts is exactly about that.
- k__ 2y ago
  "The case against reality" is also about that. But as far as I know, not many scientists think this is a reasonable idea.
  - scoofy 2y ago
    Ultimately it doesn’t matter if it’s reasonable. If it were true, life would be absurd. So, philosophically, we can assume it’s untrue because the alternative means being wrong about it doesn’t matter.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
scoofy 2y ago
> Consciousness is the only thing that can not possibly be an illusion. It can be. Suppose consciousness is a series of infinitesimal snapshots, where existence flickers for a moment and then disappears, with a new existence birthed in the next moment. Like a motion picture, at each moment we do not have a sensible version of consciousness, merely a burst of sensation, but in aggregate, as a film, consciousness springs from nothing.
- wild_egg 2y ago
  Very similar to how LLMs work but at much higher frequency
  - liamwire 2y ago
    we’re all just CI/CD pipelines
- Barrin92 2y ago
  > as a film, consciousness springs from nothing. But it doesn't. Because the film depends on the screen and the projector. This was one of Kant's central points, although he used the fancy term "transcendental unity of apperception". To even experience a set of images as disjointed, to see individual parts as relating to each other there has to be a unified experience judging them as disjointed against, the "thinking I". Without the observer already implicit in the thought experiment about images constituting a film, there is no "film" because nothing in it would have the ability to even conceive of itself as such. Hindus have a very elegant term for this "witness-consciousness" (Atman), importantly like in Kant distinct from ego and mind, not experience but a formal condition for experience. David Bentley Hart also has a great section about this in his recent book: "Every composite thing, he acknowledges, is an aggregate of several other things, and all its actions are aggregations of diverse actions and accident. [...] If it’s the composite thing that’s doing the thinking, then each part of the composite possesses only a part of the thought, and only in the aggregate is there a complete thought—but then who or what is having that thought? Where does that thought as a unity occur? Can it be just another part of the brain, with its own diverse parts and its own necessary inner coordinating facility? But then that too is made up of partially competent ..."
richardw 2y ago
People run on autopilot unless we put in effort to focus on the current moment. Almost everyone demonstrates bad habits that show how little conscious awareness and control we have. LLM’s can replicate a lot of our activities, so the realm of “consciousness” is in the things that the AI can’t do by simply repackaging and regurgitating content back at us. What we can claim as conscious special sauce has grown smaller over the last 15 years. Argument 2: Could we design a machine that is absolutely sure it’s conscious, but is not? If so, what differentiates us from it? Open question, I’m not sure. But I’d be surprised if we can be permanently sure.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Argument 2 seems more like a thought-experiment or a question than an argument. (Unless maybe I missed the point?) Anyway, isn’t a machine that “is absolutely sure” (of anything at all) having subjective experience (I think is the word, not a brainologist) by definition anyway? We could clearly design a machine that asserts that it is self aware very strenuously printf(“I *am* experiencing existence!”); But whether or not it actually sure of anything or experiencing at all is the question in the first place.
  - richardw 2y ago
    How do you know you’re not an automaton that thinks it’s conscious? Not feel. Not think. Not have a strong vibe. Proof. I don’t have to prove anything here, because I’m not the one making an assertion. My thought experiment demonstrates a situation where an entity thinks it’s conscious but isn’t. Humans think we’re conscious but can’t prove it.
    - jstanley 2y ago
      This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about. How can you be remotely unsure about whether you are conscious? It is inconceivable to me that you could be conscious and unaware of it. It's an oxymoron. Of course you can be unsure about whether others are conscious. But if you are conscious then you know that you are. Do you experience things at all? Or are you a soulless machine that takes inputs and gives outputs and doesn't experience anything on the inside? If the former, you're conscious and you know it.
wat10000 2y ago
I agree. It has a great parallel to the debate over mental imagery. There was a big debate over whether it’s real, with one group saying of course it’s real, and the other saying it’s obviously just a metaphor. Turns out some people can visualize stuff and some can’t. Maybe some people are conscious and some aren’t. It would explain why so many people argue weird things about consciousness.
grantcas 2y ago
[dead]

pcthrowaway 2y ago

The person above meant "the persistence of consciousness" Yes, we are conscious (or at least I am, I'm assuming y'all are too). But consciousness isn't static. My consciousness today is not my consciousness of 5 years ago.

sage92 2y ago
Begs the question: by what metric are you using to track the change/staticity? I don’t see how one can concretely come to the conclusion of whether it changes or stays the same, when the presence of consciousness itself is a prerequisite of making that very claim
- pcthrowaway 2y ago
  Well if you believe there's something magical about consciousness I could see why you'd believe the same person's consciousness at different points in time is the same consciousness. If you believe consciousness is a function of sentience and self-awareness, and presumably that AI can one day be conscious (not saying it is right now), then I don't see how you can believe consciousness is persistent. If the AI is copied/moved to a different server, is it the same consciousness? Or in Star Trek when you get beamed up are you the same consciousness?
  - sage92 2y ago
    Safe to say you tend to lean towards your second presentation of consciousness. I tend to lean towards the idea that conscious is akin to a field in the sense of an electron field - that what we can measure are simply “excitations” of a more subtle field. Not a perfect metaphor, but it’s the closest thing to what matches my meditative experiences. IMO, it’s illogical for me to let another subjective being define what my substrate is, so I primarily rely on meditation and then supplement with objective observations. All in all it really depends on what you define as consciousness. The issue that I have with most “objective” interpretations of consciousness is that we can only measure the excitations of this mysterious “life” thing is. If there is more to us than can be measured, e.g, that there are first person experiences that can be felt subjectively but not measured objectively, then any objective measure of consciousness will likely be limited. Consciousness seems from my pov to be the Achilles heal of the axiomatic assumptions of our scientific paradigm (at least in the west) In response to your question, it depends on your definition of consciousness. Is neural activity the source of consciousness, or is neural activity the result of consciousness? How can we know for sure which?
- jhanschoo 2y ago
  The me who is engrossed in a conversation with a peer over dinner at night focusing on the topic at hand surely is a different consciousness as the me fighting to stay awake just after lunch. They think and emotionally experience very different things.

deepsun 2y ago

"Blindsight" by Peter Watts is exactly about that.

k__ 2y ago
"The case against reality" is also about that. But as far as I know, not many scientists think this is a reasonable idea.
- scoofy 2y ago
  Ultimately it doesn’t matter if it’s reasonable. If it were true, life would be absurd. So, philosophically, we can assume it’s untrue because the alternative means being wrong about it doesn’t matter.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

scoofy 2y ago

> Consciousness is the only thing that can not possibly be an illusion. It can be. Suppose consciousness is a series of infinitesimal snapshots, where existence flickers for a moment and then disappears, with a new existence birthed in the next moment. Like a motion picture, at each moment we do not have a sensible version of consciousness, merely a burst of sensation, but in aggregate, as a film, consciousness springs from nothing.

wild_egg 2y ago
Very similar to how LLMs work but at much higher frequency
- liamwire 2y ago
  we’re all just CI/CD pipelines
Barrin92 2y ago
> as a film, consciousness springs from nothing. But it doesn't. Because the film depends on the screen and the projector. This was one of Kant's central points, although he used the fancy term "transcendental unity of apperception". To even experience a set of images as disjointed, to see individual parts as relating to each other there has to be a unified experience judging them as disjointed against, the "thinking I". Without the observer already implicit in the thought experiment about images constituting a film, there is no "film" because nothing in it would have the ability to even conceive of itself as such. Hindus have a very elegant term for this "witness-consciousness" (Atman), importantly like in Kant distinct from ego and mind, not experience but a formal condition for experience. David Bentley Hart also has a great section about this in his recent book: "Every composite thing, he acknowledges, is an aggregate of several other things, and all its actions are aggregations of diverse actions and accident. [...] If it’s the composite thing that’s doing the thinking, then each part of the composite possesses only a part of the thought, and only in the aggregate is there a complete thought—but then who or what is having that thought? Where does that thought as a unity occur? Can it be just another part of the brain, with its own diverse parts and its own necessary inner coordinating facility? But then that too is made up of partially competent ..."

richardw 2y ago

People run on autopilot unless we put in effort to focus on the current moment. Almost everyone demonstrates bad habits that show how little conscious awareness and control we have. LLM’s can replicate a lot of our activities, so the realm of “consciousness” is in the things that the AI can’t do by simply repackaging and regurgitating content back at us. What we can claim as conscious special sauce has grown smaller over the last 15 years. Argument 2: Could we design a machine that is absolutely sure it’s conscious, but is not? If so, what differentiates us from it? Open question, I’m not sure. But I’d be surprised if we can be permanently sure.

bee_rider 2y ago
Argument 2 seems more like a thought-experiment or a question than an argument. (Unless maybe I missed the point?) Anyway, isn’t a machine that “is absolutely sure” (of anything at all) having subjective experience (I think is the word, not a brainologist) by definition anyway? We could clearly design a machine that asserts that it is self aware very strenuously printf(“I *am* experiencing existence!”); But whether or not it actually sure of anything or experiencing at all is the question in the first place.
- richardw 2y ago
  How do you know you’re not an automaton that thinks it’s conscious? Not feel. Not think. Not have a strong vibe. Proof. I don’t have to prove anything here, because I’m not the one making an assertion. My thought experiment demonstrates a situation where an entity thinks it’s conscious but isn’t. Humans think we’re conscious but can’t prove it.
  - jstanley 2y ago
    This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about. How can you be remotely unsure about whether you are conscious? It is inconceivable to me that you could be conscious and unaware of it. It's an oxymoron. Of course you can be unsure about whether others are conscious. But if you are conscious then you know that you are. Do you experience things at all? Or are you a soulless machine that takes inputs and gives outputs and doesn't experience anything on the inside? If the former, you're conscious and you know it.

wat10000 2y ago

I agree. It has a great parallel to the debate over mental imagery. There was a big debate over whether it’s real, with one group saying of course it’s real, and the other saying it’s obviously just a metaphor. Turns out some people can visualize stuff and some can’t. Maybe some people are conscious and some aren’t. It would explain why so many people argue weird things about consciousness.

grantcas 2y ago

[dead]