21–30 of 393 posts
Imagination is also a part in probabilistic decision making, an unhinged prediction machine.
My 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.
The article poses this question, but leaves it unanswered.
For me it begs the question: If conscousness is bound to a location, is it possible to transfer consciousness from one entity to another? Is there some kind of thing we did not yet detect? What happens when you die or someone is born?
Or maybe, we all (humans, animals and things) share a single consciousness and for each Planck time duration switch through all of them without knowing?
I love to think about stuff like this, but are those questions even answerable?
Occasionalists believe that in order for cause and effect to work, God has to intercede. This rather elegantly deals with a whole load of theoretical problems around causal realism.
If you were an occasionalist, you might think, if such a thing as a 'god-of-the-gaps' exist, it should be possible to build a device that mimics its powers, a 'god machine'. Such a device would be very useful.
Except, if occasionalism is wrong, and the universe simply doesn't work like that, it's obviously going to be totally impossible to build a machine that replicates the effect, or to understand how the effect could function.
What if consciousness is just another 'god-of-the-gaps', and we can't replicate it or understand it, because it's fundamentally a nonsensical concept?
Thanks 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.
Depending on how you define "reality" we only experience a tiny subset of it. We can only see/hear/touch/smell/taste a very restricted universe, only what our "antennas" can detect. In fact I would argue that we experience close to 0% of all of reality. On top of this extremely restricted input our processing of it is imperfect which means some of what we experience has nothing to do with reality.
What I find fascinating about consciousness is that it seems to be bound to your location. But how and why? Why are you inside of your body and not in someone elses? The article poses this question, but leaves it unanswered. For me it begs the question: If conscousness is bound to a location, is it possible to transfer consciousness from one entity to another? Is there some kind of thing we did not yet detect? What h…
Why is consciousness bound to a person's location? Because their brain is bound inside their skull.
Why are you inside your body and not someone else's? Because your brain is inside your body and not someone else's.
Is it possible to transfer consciousness from one entity to another? transfer, no, because consciousness is inextricably linked to the brain. There's no separation between the hardware and the "software."
What happens when you die or someone is born? Nothing. No afterlife, to karma, no reincarnation, no bardo, nothing.
And finally, are those questions even answerable?
Yes, I believe they are, but many people are uncomfortable with the ramifications of the answer as best supported by available evidence - we are purely physical beings existing within a purely physical universe. Despite all of the evidence from biology, neurology, chemistry, physics, etc. failing to show any credible evidence of a supernatural or non-biological component of consciousness apart from the brain, many people keep hoping someone will discover the soul someday and be free of the prison of material reality.
One troubling analogy would be occasionalism. Occasionalists believe that in order for cause and effect to work, God has to intercede. This rather elegantly deals with a whole load of theoretical problems around causal realism. If you were an occasionalist, you might think, if such a thing as a 'god-of-the-gaps' exist, it should be possible to build a device that mimics its powers, a 'god machine'. Such a device woul…
Then that occasionalist god might interfere and break your machine and maybe break you too for trying to emulate a god.
What I find fascinating about consciousness is that it seems to be bound to your location. But how and why? Why are you inside of your body and not in someone elses? The article poses this question, but leaves it unanswered. For me it begs the question: If conscousness is bound to a location, is it possible to transfer consciousness from one entity to another? Is there some kind of thing we did not yet detect? What h…
With meditation, you can get a clearer sense of what is really 'you', and what is just being observed/experienced by 'you'. But 'you' are not your body, or your thoughts, or your memories, or your feelings. Distilled, the 'you' of all living things could well be exactly the same - it is just what is fed to them by the hardware differs.
What I find fascinating about consciousness is that it seems to be bound to your location. But how and why? Why are you inside of your body and not in someone elses? The article poses this question, but leaves it unanswered. For me it begs the question: If conscousness is bound to a location, is it possible to transfer consciousness from one entity to another? Is there some kind of thing we did not yet detect? What h…
There is no magic. Consciousness is an illusion. It's an emergent behavior from an incredibly complex neural automata.