141–150 of 377 posts
Too many words chasing too few ideas.
If the sun is conscious, that could explain why humanity believes in a powerful god that can, eg, send floods. Perhaps the flood was caused by a coronal mass ejection that boiled a section of the ocean, causing extreme rains in a valley region. Let's imagine that the consciousness field of the sun encompasses all of our minds.. so thinking about it might let us talk to it. So prayer could be real too. They can probab…
This doesn't make sense. In the case of humans and animals, consciousness is a way to adapt to the environment to protect their lives, fulfill their needs and eventually reproduce. Consciousness is useful for life. But in the case of the sun, what is it adapting to, and what does it have to protect? Nothing. The fact that consciousness appears always in populations might be essential. Consciousness was the result of…
Someone ought to trick analytic philosophers into taking some of the more popular psychoactive substances, so they finally discover how tightly coupled consciousness is to the matter in the nervous system and stop their embarrassing search for Holy Spirit. Also, the sun is clearly an anus: "The simplest image of organic life united with rotation is the tide. From the movement of the sea, uniform coitus of the earth w…
Yeah I would think anyone that has got drunk or experienced post-wank clarity should realise that consciousness isn't a separate thing to the brain's physical processes. Still, consciousness definitely exists and is definitely weird. And I don't think it's futile to try and learn about it. It's just not going to be philosophers that give us any answers (as usual).
I'd like to suggest comparing observations from Merleu-Ponty and late modern neuroscience, perhaps Bear et al, Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain (pick a previous edition to get it cheap).
Tl;dr We shouldn't care. Is my partner conscious? My dog? Actually, I don't know. I can say that I experience myself as conscious. In our daily interactions we never ask such questions. Last week, I hired a new programmer. We checked the CV and the code challenge. We invited the candidate to see how they get around with the team etc. At no point, we asked if they're conscious. I think our brains are machines for pred…
Technologist thinks that humans are machines (breaking news)
> Therefore, a large brain makes sense because it can simulate the world more precisely and make better predictions.
Whence consciousness?
> One mistake of this simulation is that the brain simulates us as a conscious agent who can make their own decisions and act in the world.
A mistake? Like a random mutation (consciousness) which just persisted because there was no evolutionary pressure to get rid of it?
Or did it persist in everyone? Maybe half of humanity is conscious while the other half is not? They operate exactly the same except the conscious half wastes some kilojoules fretting over awareness.
A machine doesn’t need to simulate being aware of decision-making. That’s cruft. Wasted cycles.
Maybe you’re reasoning backwards from the human-centric idea that “making decisions” requires awareness. But then you incoherently assert that humans are machines, and machines don’t need consciousness to make decisions.
> Maybe evolution set up this illusion on purpose so that we don't get depressed and kill ourselves.
So (if I am understanding correctly), consciousness was a random mutation of a complex organism. Of course someone can be conscious and not feel like they have free will. Like they are just along for the ride. But this is “depressing” somehow.[1] So now a free will illusion mutation has to occur in order to protect the machine from self-killing.
Seems convoluted.
[1] But why? 80% of the HN philosophers seem fine with it.
If the sun is conscious, that could explain why humanity believes in a powerful god that can, eg, send floods. Perhaps the flood was caused by a coronal mass ejection that boiled a section of the ocean, causing extreme rains in a valley region. Let's imagine that the consciousness field of the sun encompasses all of our minds.. so thinking about it might let us talk to it. So prayer could be real too. They can probab…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn't make sense. In the case of humans and animals, consciousness is a way to adapt to the environment to protect their lives, fulfill their needs and eventually reproduce. Consciousness is useful for life. But in the case of the sun, what is it adapting to, and what does it have to protect? Nothing. The fact that consciousness appears always in populations might be essential. Consciousness was the result of…
I’m not sure this makes sense. Lots of phenomena — including those possessed by biological organisms — exist without there being any evolutionary imperative for their existence. For your argument to work, would you not have to demonstrate that consciousness is necessarily more like, say, animal fur than possessing mass or heat.
> self-organizing systems at all levels of complexity, including stars and galaxies, might have experience, awareness, or consciousness. It must be terrifying if you're a galactic entity and have experience, awareness, and consciousness, but no autonomy w.r.t. movement, trapped in a trillion-year path that you cannot escape.
> Assuming that the galactic mind works in and through electromagnetic fields, then its thoughts and perceptions must be very slow indeed, by our standards. The radius of the Milky Way is about 50,000 light years, so it would take at least this length of time for the galactic centre to perceive what is happening at the periphery, and as long again for it to act on star systems at the edge.
Instead of having a consciousness that has to wait 50,000 years for some input, it makes more sense for a consciousness to experience time on a scale where input happen in (say) 100ms consciouss-perceived time or so. So what looks like 500,000 years for us is a second to a galaxy.
[1] The HN philosophers can argue about free will or not but here only the feeling of having it is relevant
Apologies if this is a dumb question or a taboo question or both, but what the does “conscious” mean? We know about lots of complex systems, and systems that exhibit “emergent” behaviors seeming much more complex and goal-directed than the components of the system (the glider gun, that thing with the computer-modeled birds with like 3 simple rules but then the whole flock does complicated, creative stuff, long list).…
You've hit on the root of the debate, but you might have missed it. The debate is to define the meaning of consciousness. We've got a general problem of not knowing what consciousness is, if it actually exists, how many people have it, if it is exclusive to humans and not really having a good philosophical grounding for (assuming multiple separate consciousnesses could exist) whether in practice that is the case of i…
It seems likely that it exists, because why would we discuss it? (Occam's razor) Also consciousness has an effect on physics for the same reason.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn't make sense. In the case of humans and animals, consciousness is a way to adapt to the environment to protect their lives, fulfill their needs and eventually reproduce. Consciousness is useful for life. But in the case of the sun, what is it adapting to, and what does it have to protect? Nothing. The fact that consciousness appears always in populations might be essential. Consciousness was the result of…
I’m not sure this makes sense. Lots of phenomena — including those possessed by biological organisms — exist without there being any evolutionary imperative for their existence. For your argument to work, would you not have to demonstrate that consciousness is necessarily more like, say, animal fur than possessing mass or heat.
There are certainly many things, such as the specific patterning of a moth's camouflage, where a certain amount of chance is involved, and there are Gould's "spandrels" - features that exist, not for themselves, but because constraints on what is possible require them - but anything significant that makes no sense in terms of evolution would be a matter of the greatest significance in biology.
But this is beside the point here, as there is no difficulty (except perhaps self-imposed ones) in seeing the utility of consciousness.