Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

How do you define "consciousness", though?

If we define it to be just a human interpretation of an observed physical process, and we believe subjective experience to be an illusion, then the hard problem is not a problem at all. That's comparable to calling an animal a horse: we define "horse" to be a category of animal, but we don't expect it to have any "special" properties for being a horse, and we can relate to lower-level processes all the properties that lead us to define it as a horse. Such properties are empirically measurable and don't behave in any way that would be expected from the laws of physics.

But if we assume subjective experience to be real and to be more than just a description of the physical system, then we do have a problem: we have the burden of explaining where it comes from (which is why theories like emergentism, panpsychism, etc. were created). We can't test such theories empirically, as the only subjective experience we can perceive is that of a fully conscious (in the medical sense) human brain, and we cannot share such experience. That's why the metaphysics of consciousness is not considered science.

> Just because consciousness is a result of information processing, that doesn’t mean all information processing systems are conscious.

Indeed. But if consciousness is anything more than a label to describe a specific sort of system, and subjective experience is real, then we have to show such special "consciousness" (with subjective experience) exists in the first place, and how it can emerge from parts without any form of consciousness. As we're unable to do that in a way that can be empirically tested, such theories are not scientific. Panpsychism is of course no exception to this, as we cannot test whether lower levels of information processing are or are not conscious either.

No worries, been exactly there on a real emotional level. Wishing you personally the best of luck too, and proud of you for meeting the anxiety-head on with therapy. :)

Very good analogy, though I'm completely lost what is what, but it's probably because it's too early here :D

Can we all agree on the concept of 3 though? :) I mean PhD dissertations are written and successfully defended each day pro-and-contra 3.

Do we have a shared concept? Is 3 the same for a research mathematician and a 5 year old?

In practice if it works it works. The same with colors, or music, or ... well, any sort of thing and associated qualia. After all when you say 1/3 + 2/3 most people will say 1 (hopefully, though I have no idea how well known fractions are), but those pesky programmers might just laugh and say that you can't even represent them accurately.

This shows that integers (and the natural numbers) and basic arithmetical are so old in our culture that they truly are probably shared with 99.9% of humans (or let's say English speakers). But if we step a little bit outside of that by taking 4 and 8, then you might like them because they are nice powers of 2, but some Chinese people might not like 4 because it's association with death (but do like 8 because it's association with wealth & success).

And so the question is: the mind that wakes up is the same as the one that went unconscious? Is there even an abstract concept of our minds? (How tied minds are to their physical representation?) Solipsism states that despite everything indicating that there are things independently (materially or not) outside of our mind it doesn't matter because our mind is truly the only thing we have, we are, we'll ever have. (It can be a complete simulation, it can be just a dream, we can never know!)

Joscha Bach's "computationalism" (maybe he doesn't call it that) says that consciousness is evolution's answer to "how to regulate the organism in relation to other self-regulating organisms", so it's a self-directed attention of intelligence (which is also a model of things that we pay attention to). In this regard consciousness is just as part of the population as the genome, so while there are definitely you and me, but at the same time it's the same "evolutionary software" just running on a big shared pool of brains. (Which also means that we could compare every concept via computation - eg. enumerating its properties (and so on the properties required for those properties of course, so infinite regress creeps in), and this means that we can have a shared concept of 3, if it's computationally equivalent.)

"Soap bubbles are computational so everything is computational."

Wait, what?

So get a wood panel, put a few pegs on it, submerge it in soapy water and then slowly raise it from the water.

The soap film that forms between the pegs wants to minimize its surface area (to maximize its energy) so it forms a Steiner tree beteween the pegs, but .. not always!

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1720 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=122

> solipsism feels like

Yes, exactly, yet it's unfalsifiable. Which makes it unscientific, but doesn't make it incorrect. It's just a maximally useless (trivial) model of the world.

The importance depends on how you value some of our impact in the world. Some people say that life makes no sense if in the end you will be destroyed and disappear forever. I can see that in this scenario, individualism, egotism, and things like these are senseless. But not necessarily life. Humanity as a whole is writing a history in the world. As long as this story continues, we have an impact and our legacies will persist. Memories about us will also persist, specially if you define "memory" as information stored somewhere, not necessarily in a brain, and not necessarily intact and imutable.

About the nihilism that in the end everything will be destroyed... Well, there is a part in the bible where someone says that there are never something new under the sun. Our struggles are equal the struggles that someone before had. Our problems are equal the problems that someone already had in the past. And everything that we do is irrelevant in the end. Which is false, and for us that have access to studies in history, we can easily see that is false. We have new problems in modern times. Our development also turned us less irrelevant. While still astronomically minuscule, we are not anymore worldly minuscule. We have power to change the climate in the entire planet, we can even destroy most life and even ourselves with our technology, we are beginning to explore other worlds. What is the limit? It is unknown. If in the antique world it was easy to be mistaken thinking that the limits that they had were the definitive human limits, why wouldn't be also easy for us being wrong thinking that the limits that we currently have are definitive? Yes, now we have limits on how could we deal with the destruction of our solar system. But we could in the future learn how to survive this. We do not know and never will know what is the limit for what we can achieve. Therefore, believing that all is senseless because our limits will trap us in a dead end is a not very useful unbased claim. This is a case where Pascal's wager makes sense: if indeed we will be unavoidably trapped in a dead end, you lose nothing thinking that there is a way to avoid this, but if we are able to escape the dead end and extinction, it is deleterious to believe that the extinction is unavoidable.