What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
1–10 of 393 posts
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#2Thanks for the link. I agree with Seth that consciousness is much like a controlled hallucination - after all, we don't experience reality directly, but through the predictions of our brain. But then the question is, why do you need this hallucination? I suspect that consciousness evolved because it makes an organism more capable than one who doesn't. But what does consciousness offer over just taking in sensory input and making predictions without having qualia (much like a computer does)?
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#3Thanks for the link. I agree with Seth that consciousness is much like a controlled hallucination - after all, we don't experience reality directly, but through the predictions of our brain. But then the question is, why do you need this hallucination? I suspect that consciousness evolved because it makes an organism more capable than one who doesn't. But what does consciousness offer over just taking in sensory inpu…
Is it the fact that a computer doesn’t have one of a sort?
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#4Thanks for the link. I agree with Seth that consciousness is much like a controlled hallucination - after all, we don't experience reality directly, but through the predictions of our brain. But then the question is, why do you need this hallucination? I suspect that consciousness evolved because it makes an organism more capable than one who doesn't. But what does consciousness offer over just taking in sensory inpu…
I think the important part is that you can represent more things in consciousness than just "five-sense data", ie. exotic sense data like emotions, reactions, imagination, memory, impulses, selfhood, and correlate them with the ordinary sensory data. A non-conscious animal may see a predator and get scared, but I don't know if it knows that it's scared because of the predator. I think you need an integrated space for both direct data and metadata for that.
Also, in humans, I'd presume that consciousness, being introspectable, relates to our ability to understand our own interests and behaviors, and those of others, in symbolic terms and express them with language. It's how we close the circle between thinking and "I think".
(I agree with the article that people vastly overestimate the mystery of consciousness.)
PS: I think consciousness being introspectable is very underrated. We can perceive memories of perception, we can feel nostalgic for having felt a certain way in the past, and we can realize and name that we are doing this. The "reentrancy" of consciousness is a core aspect of our cognitive and strategic flexibility.
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#5Thanks for the link. I agree with Seth that consciousness is much like a controlled hallucination - after all, we don't experience reality directly, but through the predictions of our brain. But then the question is, why do you need this hallucination? I suspect that consciousness evolved because it makes an organism more capable than one who doesn't. But what does consciousness offer over just taking in sensory inpu…
The hallucination analogy is useful I think in some ways, in that it could allow access to a view of reality that has important parts represented in a meaningful way. But, surely a hallucination requires an underlying consciousness to experience it? So for me it's not very useful in explaining the phenonmenon of consciousness itself. It seems that it's not far removed from the old "theatre" analogy, which requires an unexplained "homunculus" (and probably homunculi ad infinitum).
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#6[flagged]
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#7Thanks for the link. I agree with Seth that consciousness is much like a controlled hallucination - after all, we don't experience reality directly, but through the predictions of our brain. But then the question is, why do you need this hallucination? I suspect that consciousness evolved because it makes an organism more capable than one who doesn't. But what does consciousness offer over just taking in sensory inpu…
Explanations like "consciousness is a controlled hallucination" or "consciousness is just an illusion" don't answer anything for me.
To be able to have a hallucination or an illusion, you still need the consciousness experiencing that. Explain that consciousness.
> I suspect that consciousness evolved because it makes an organism more capable than one who doesn't.
You can't prove consciousness from behavior (afaik), and it's behavior that makes organisms more capable
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#8> One point on which you both clearly agree is that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon,
It probably is but I wouldn't be so sure it is. I have neither a feeling nor a rationally logical proof of this idea. It's just an intuitive guess.
> we have the ineffable experience of being alive in this world
The experience of being, and the experience of attributes like "alive" and in "somewhere in particular" are separate things. AFAIK the latter even is attributed to specific parts of the brain scientifically and it's known these can be broken. I certainly feel like "I am" but I have no idea of whether I am alive and in which world I am the first seconds after the alarm clock rings. I feel my being and also have visual perception but judgement/semantics in what I see emerges 0.5-10 seconds later.
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#9Thanks for the link. I agree with Seth that consciousness is much like a controlled hallucination - after all, we don't experience reality directly, but through the predictions of our brain. But then the question is, why do you need this hallucination? I suspect that consciousness evolved because it makes an organism more capable than one who doesn't. But what does consciousness offer over just taking in sensory inpu…
maybe consciousness is a side effect, an emergent phenomena. once the brain gets complicated enough it will just arise (on a scale)... also are our decisions ours? or some inner layer in us creates the decision and then we just consciously observe it / let it play out...
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#10Thanks for the link. I agree with Seth that consciousness is much like a controlled hallucination - after all, we don't experience reality directly, but through the predictions of our brain. But then the question is, why do you need this hallucination? I suspect that consciousness evolved because it makes an organism more capable than one who doesn't. But what does consciousness offer over just taking in sensory inpu…
We obviously don't have the full picture about sensations -- they might be a side effect of specialized (biochemical) neural architectures, but more likely there is something intrinsic to them that grants advantages to sensations.
There's something to making things really "personal" to an individual system having sensations that make it act in its best interest.
Sensations are also very flexible biochemical abstractions and solutions to problems across aeons.
It would have been quite hard for organisms to evolve without such abstractions -- like a worm recoiling in pain and a human quickly rettacting his burnt hand or avoiding certain kinds of people who have hurt him before.