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What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

nautil.us

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Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#91

Post by guerrilla »

jbotz wrote: post #89
whaaswijk wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: how can consciousness be an illusion? I’m not even sure what that would mean. One could argue that many things are illusory (e.g. the external world). But it’s quite hard to dismiss the notion of actual experience occurring in the world. Our experiences could lead us to false conclusions, sure, but we cannot deny their existence.

The experiences are real, but the homunculus behind your eyes that you think of as yourself is an illusion. In reality there are a bunch of fairly independent processes talking to each other, sharing the perceptions, reacting to them, feedback from those reactions again become a perception, a "narrator" process that often gives running commentary in your mother-tongue, etc. The interaction of those processes feels li…

I think they were referring to Daniel Dennett, not Antonio Damasio or Anil Seth. Damasio is interested in how the self is constructed (so, similar to your idea) while Seth is saying that experience is a controlled hallucination. Dennett is the one claiming consciousness is an illusion. These are three very distinct research programs.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#92

Post by zubspace »

abernard1 wrote: post #52
krapp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only fascinating if you refuse to accept a non-supernatural or non-metaphysical definition of consciousness. Otherwise, most of these questions become trivial when consciousness is considered as a physical, biological process bound to the brain. 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…

> Otherwise, most of these questions become trivial when consciousness is considered as a physical, biological process bound to the brain. If it were trivial, we'd be creating conscious entities via knowhow and will, not the old fashioned (fun) way. We... need it be said... cannot. We can't even describe what consciousness is in a way it can be measured or analyzed. We can make things that do things, sure. We can eve…

Well said. I think one of the problems is, that most just think that consciousness is a given and have a hard time to acknowledge, that we actually have no damn clue what it really is.

It's easy to say, that believing in a soul or something like it is hogwash, but just closing your eyes and telling yourself "I think and therefore I am" does not bring us any closer to an answer.

We have to assume that all unfalsifiable arguments could be true until we have proof, that they are incorrect. That is the only scientific approach.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#93

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Like Dennett in "Consciousness Explained", both of these authors seem almost entirely focused on what we are conscious of rather than the fact that we are conscious of anything at all. Their descriptions of their work are all centered on the question of what it is that we actually experience. This is is a fascinating question, and entirely worthy of investigation.

But it is not the same question as: how is it possible that we have any experience at all?

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#94

Post by yboris »

My favorite read on this topic is Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett

He's a philosopher who has spent a lifetime thinking about this problem, informed by the latest science of the day. Plus he's an excellent, lucid writer. He is a materialist, optimistic about being able to have as-satisfactory of an explanation of consciousness in the future as we do for life (no "élan vital" needed).

https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Denn...

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#95

Post by hsnewman »

I've been studying consciousness recently, specifically the question of how physics can explain it. It turns out there is a Strong Emergence theory, which physics shows only consciousness as proof. I find it a fascinating theory. It is strong emergence if "The whole is other than the sum of its parts."

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#96

Post by zubspace »

guerrilla wrote: post #86
pessimizer wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Count me as a P-Zombie. I think the reason that consciousness is a hard problem is that it's largely used as a word referring to nothing in particular, and as such can be argued about endlessly. The real problem is locality. Why am I located in me instead of in you? Why is it so much easier for me to see out of my eyes than it is for me to see out of yours? What's the connection between my perspective and my body? Th…

> What's the connection between my perspective and my body? Your body is doing the experiencing. It is what's perceiving. Your mind is just your body's UI for the world and your body is the user.

The interesting bit is not the sensory input. We mostly know how the sensors work and how they are triggered.

The fun question is, what exactly is connected to those sensors and experiences them and where is the location of that thing?

It's like we're sitting with a VR headset in our brain, playing that game we call life. But, where exactly are we and how is that headset connected to our sensors?

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#97

Post by mannykannot »

abernard1 wrote: post #39
hibernator149 wrote: post #20

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.

> I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. I can respect this, but I think you have much bigger problems than consciousness if you're a materialist. Current natural philosophy and physics is far from anything resembling a materialistic worldview. Where we are right now in both QM and GR can best be described as a highly precise description of what happens, but…

> To put a finer point on it, unless physicists can provide a materialistic explanation for entanglement or wavefunction collapse, we're still very much in an ethereal, immaterial world.

Maybe the lesson of physics is that the material world is not like how we might imagine it, based on our everyday intuitions. If you accept that the world is not moving and not flat, that bodies continue in motion unless acted on by a force, and that Lorentz transformations represent the relationship between different inertial frames, then you already accept things that are counter to everyday intuitions. Hopes for explanations that are not ultimately grounded in "that, as far as we know, is just how things are" might be wishful thinking.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#98

Post by willis936 »

hamilyon2 wrote: post #80
misja111 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An illusion is a belief or perception which does not match reality. A belief is something that is stored in memory. So there is nothing to 'observe' about an illusion; an illusion is an error in either memory or perception of the observer himself.

I think I understand what gp means. He is trying to point to a contradiction in ggp reasoning. The question is in the definition of words "subjective" and "observer". You cannot define an observer using the concept of observer, that's circular reasoning. "Incredibly complex neural automata" is just handwaving the problem away. Equivalent of saying "here the magic happens", not an explanation.

It isn't handwaving. I'm saying the act of observation is not special. It's matter knowing it's matter. "Observation" and "knowing" are simply emergent behaviors of the matter. There is no divine step between matter and consciousness. I'm saying there is nothing to explain because consciousness should not be viewed through the lens of it being special.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#99

Post by Sosh101 »

yboris wrote: post #94

My favorite read on this topic is Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett He's a philosopher who has spent a lifetime thinking about this problem, informed by the latest science of the day. Plus he's an excellent, lucid writer. He is a materialist, optimistic about being able to have as-satisfactory of an explanation of consciousness in the future as we do for life (no "élan vital" needed). https://www.amazon.co…

Or as some like to call it Consciousness Denied :)

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#100

Post by shrimp_emoji »

guerrilla wrote: post #86
pessimizer wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Count me as a P-Zombie. I think the reason that consciousness is a hard problem is that it's largely used as a word referring to nothing in particular, and as such can be argued about endlessly. The real problem is locality. Why am I located in me instead of in you? Why is it so much easier for me to see out of my eyes than it is for me to see out of yours? What's the connection between my perspective and my body? Th…

> What's the connection between my perspective and my body? Your body is doing the experiencing. It is what's perceiving. Your mind is just your body's UI for the world and your body is the user.

And then step into the Star Trek transporter. :)

You're obliterated, then perfectly reassembled on the other side. Is that still "you", "subjectively"? Should you or others even care about that question? And, if not, damn, that's ego-killing af.

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