What’s so hard about understanding consciousness? • Hacker News Board

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#391

Post by mrkramer » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 10:11 PM UTC

mrkramer wrote: post #171

lisper wrote: post #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 ri…

>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. This is called instinct. It is evolutionary mechanism so you don't have to think what to do when you are getting hurt and your life is in danger. You react instantaneously.

Edit: Better phrase would be: It is evolutionary mechanism so you don't have to think what to do every time* when you are getting hurt and your life is in danger.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#392

Post by Atlas667 » Wed, Feb 09, 2022, 2:23 PM UTC

agent008t wrote: post #40

Atlas667 wrote: post #21

I believe people with psychedelic experiences can attest to the controlled hallucination theory of consciousness. But only those with a materialist world view while idealists may posit souls or alternate realities. Imagination is also a part in probabilistic decision making, an unhinged prediction machine.

The fact that we experience what is being fed to 'us' by the various hardware devices, and not reality itself, is not controversial. The question is, what is the nature of the 'experiencer'?

See lobotomies and brain damage. See eye and nerve damage. See people with syndromes or developmental disorders.

The experiencer is the sum of your body's processes. It's what it feels like to be your body. To be connected to all your parts. To have been raised and taught to react, to have instincts and decision making circuits based on these. It's a material thing. Vision is the sense of eye, thought is the speculative sense of sensing, etc.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#393

Post by agent008t » Fri, Feb 11, 2022, 10:48 AM UTC

Atlas667 wrote: post #392

agent008t wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that we experience what is being fed to 'us' by the various hardware devices, and not reality itself, is not controversial. The question is, what is the nature of the 'experiencer'?

See lobotomies and brain damage. See eye and nerve damage. See people with syndromes or developmental disorders. The experiencer is the sum of your body's processes. It's what it feels like to be your body. To be connected to all your parts. To have been raised and taught to react, to have instincts and decision making circuits based on these. It's a material thing. Vision is the sense of eye, thought is the speculat…

You are describing the experience, not the experiencer. The experience is indeed the sum of your body's processes.