Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

I don't see a major problem with the difference between your own and other consciousness. Let's say you are American, and had never travelled abroad. You've only heard tales of France and Japan from others. Do you suspect that other countries have a fundamentally different nature to your own?

>So you have the question of why I can only directly perceive that emergent property in exactly one brain and not others

You are the thing carrying around that brain and sense organs, and the plumbing thereof. This is a unique situation, hence the uniqueness.

> Likewise you'd have to explain why the emergent property is apparently continuous through my whole lifetime over which my brain changes enormously.

Emergent phenomenon can be very robust, such as Jupiter's spot which was observed 340 years ago, or the common orbital plane of the solar system, which is billions of years old.

Also, your consciousness is not continuous. You turn (at least some of) it off when you go to sleep. Very curious! It's at least robustly bistable!

> Finally you'd have to deal with the hypothetical case where I am duplicated molecule for molecule and then ask which consciousness would I have direct access to, the duplicate or the original.

This seems very simple too. There are two copies of you at the instant of duplication, which diverge from that moment on. You1 would have access to the consciousness of You1's nervous system and You2 that created by You2's nervous system. This question is only difficult if you insist on something other than the bodies being involved.

I think elimitavists like Dennett don't deny that things go on, just that consciousness, in he form of this magical thing, doesn't exist. The demonstration of that being that many of the things people believe about consciousness that make it so magical and hard to explain simply aren't true. People are often mistaken about their own consciousness, so perhaps the remarkable mysterious thing that we can't explain doesn't exist. Instead there could be something much simpler and explainable, much in the mold of explanations that Dennett gives. The catch being that many people simply claim that the thing that Dennett can explain isn't consciousness because it doesn't do the magical things they think consciousness does.

I think therefore...Answer is Hazy. Ask again later.

The problem of a suitcase word is when different people are using different definitions to talk about the same concept. It is entirely reasonable to presuppose that that is nonsense. It has nothing to do with the complexity of the thing discussed. The problem is when there are disjoint definitions.

This article just kicks around concepts with no real insight. It's easy to demonstrate that consciousness is matter. Put a bullet through someone's brain and that person will cease to be conscious.

What is difficult to demonstrate is if that is all there is to it. For this we can turn to math. Do the intricacies of the rules of mathematics actually exist anywhere? Obviously not, unless you consider words and symbols written in books to qualify. Math exists everywhere, because you can use it to describe the physical, and it exists nowhere, because there is no literal physical representation of it anywhere.

But we can actually build physical representations of particular math equations, inputting them as programs into a computer. The representations obey the rules of mathematics, as well as the rules of the physical world, if you destroy the computer, you also destroy the operation of the program.

But yet there is more to these programs than meets the eye physically. There are hidden rules that they operate by, more than just the physical affects them. These are the rules of math. We can analyze the programs using various mathematical techniques and prove things regarding them.

It is the same way with consciousness. We only see the physical affects because that's what we're looking for. We don't see the countless hidden rules that also affect consciousness. They are so numerous and manifold that they look wholly continuous with the physical world and physical rules.

What are these rules? In a word, they are ideas. Ideas have logic to them and can be compared with other ideas. We can say that one course of action is good or bad, when compared to other courses of action. Ideas and thoughts themselves are so comparable to computer programs that it's amazing to me that we programmers scoff at the idea of thinking machines.

You analyze thoughts with other thoughts, with tools of logic. You analyze computer programs with the rules of math, many times those rules are implemented with other computer programs. The question, "what is consciousness," is purely the domain of philosophy. Biology and physics can only takes us so far in our quest to understand ourselves.

To attempt to do so would be like trying to analyze a running computer system by smashing it apart and looking at the silicon under a microscope. It fundamentally mistakes what a computer program is. And knowing that it is just electrical signals traveling across transistor gates doesn't get you very far either. Even analyzing the voltage levels across the entire running system isn't going to tell you much either.