I don’t think we understand how the brain implements computation well enough yet.
We won’t solve how the mind works untill then.
What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
11–20 of 393 posts
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#12Thanks 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 don't experience reality directly
That muddies the water, IMO. We do experience reality directly: our nerve endings do. The next step is processing, which is somewhat mediated by low-level expectations. This takes place at sub-conscious levels. Conscious perception comes much later, and is obviously more filtered. To call it a hallucination is word play.
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#13> 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 separat…
Well, being on delay doesn't detract from consciousness. Think of it this way: No matter how incredibly fast a monstrous AI ever becomes, it will always suffer some delay.
>> in which world I am the first seconds after the alarm clock rings.
Do you actually believe those are real, other worlds? I'm tempted to, sometimes. But if they are, it's more an argument that consciousness is real and something even grander than we acknowledge, if it can flip states and universes like that.
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#14> If you are feeling pain, for example, this gives you very actionable knowledge about what you should do next in order to survive.
This seems exactly backwards to me. The visceral sensation of pain exists precisely in order to bypass your conscious decision-making. When you're hurting, your body doesn't want you to start weighing the pros and cons of various courses of action, it wants you to deal with the injury right now. That is the reason that pain feels very different -- much more urgent and harder to ignore -- than (say) getting a text message informing you that you have been hurt.
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#15> 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 separat…
> The experience of being, and the experience of attributes like "alive" and in "somewhere in particular" are separate things.
Yes, you can have the former without the latter - it's a key component of attaining "enlightenment" or "stream entry", which is perhaps most feasibly achieved through vipassana meditation. This gives you a reasonably direct experience of anatta or "non-self" (where 'self' actually means something like personal identity and the attributes thereof, not phenomenological experience per se).
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#16> 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 separat…
If consciousness is not embodied that would imply metaphysics and body/mind dualism, e.i. something countrary what one might term the scientific world view.
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#17> 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 separat…
If consciousness is not embodied that would imply metaphysics and body/mind dualism, e.i. something countrary what one might term the scientific world view.
The most common naïve view among scientists is in fact quite close to body/mind dualism, much as phrased by Descartes. People who have examined the problem in depth tend to go for some form of pan-protopsychism, where the substrate for subjective phenomenology has to somehow be a part of the physical universe (since it clearly enters into causal relations with the rest of it!) but can also be expected to be rather physically simple, so that it can be consistently endowed with both "physical" and "subjectively experienced, phenomenological" features or states.
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#18[deleted]
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#19the hard problem of consciousness is just an symptom of logical positivism, which is false in its entirety
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#20My pet theory is that people who think that consciousness is not a hard problem are P-Zombies that can't experience the problem.
On a more serious note, as a materialist, I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. It's like I have this nice theory of everything, but it fails when I try to apply it to myself. Reminds me of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.