No, really—consciousness is worth thinking about

Consciousness can be modeled, and the brain can be modeled. The models can be correlated, and this is useful to us to get on the same page about what constitutes reality as a picture of "things hanging together in harmony" (compossibility). Consciousness is most important to us as a set of observation statements about us, and it is solely up to us to decide how to interpret those statements.

This can be done for other species, and this will tell us whether or not our thought-patterns are actually indicative of right-thinking, thus deserving to be repeated across larger regions of space-time.

I recommend a read of http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/369939.Philosophical_Foun....

I upvoted the original article not necessarily because I thought it was particularly well-written, but because I looked forward to seeing what the HN comments about the article would say. Nevertheless, I left to go somewhere before I had a chance to peruse them.

I think in a conversation about consciousness, it's very important to define exactly what it is you're talking about. I'm not a neuroscientist, but I get the impression that within the field, "consciousness" refers to specific patterns of brain activity. (Some neuroscientist on here can correct me if I'm wrong.) These patterns can be be studied experimentally, simulated computationally, or theorized about mathematically. All fall well into the modern definition of what science encompasses. Testable predictions about reality can be made and understood.

Then the author of the first piece uses a different word a little later in the article:

> Experience - "why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?"

This, in my opinion, is a whole different idea. As a scientist myself (my research is in molecular-dynamics and quantum monte carlo), "experience" is not something that can be assessed at all by the scientific method. Many people argue that "experience" doesn't even exist (see the concept of p-zombies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie). As for me personally, I'm certain that it does, for if you removed all of my faculties and senses with the exception of leaving my mind intact, I would still experience existence. The curious thing about this is that there's no way for me to tell whether other people (you all) exist in the same way that I do, not even in theory. How do I know if you actually experience existence or are simply a collection of particles following the same rules of physics that everything else does? For then if I was you, I wouldn't be me anymore. One prerequisite for something being scientific is that it must be testable, and this sort of thing is not. So it's not science and I don't waste time conflating it with what actually is science. It's an interesting philosophical question. It's been debated for centuries, and it will continue to be debated for centuries (along the same lines as qualia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia) but there will never be any kind of resolution to the issue.

Neuroscience hasn't been able to produce a single theory on the origin of consciousness, unless one accepts "it emerges from neural activity" as an explanation.

Consciousness appears to be the ultimate mystery. There is something very fundamental about it that we don't understand at all. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable, especially the type of people that would like to turn Science into a religion. We just don't know, and it's intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise.

Consciousness is a mystery only to those that cannot define what it is.

What is the origin of awareness itself? It is the very activities one is aware of. The activities produce energy which we call consciousness. The dimension that the consciousness can see is determined by the quality of the very activities.

Consciousness is thus not solely generated by neurological activities.

Before denying this because of your first impression, please confirm if what I'm saying is true or not, and whether it is confirmed by all evidence or if there is in fact any evidence which contradicts it. What I've said here doesn't come from my thoughts or ideas.

Everybody keeps getting the Schrödinger's cat experiment 100% backwards. It was created by Schrödinger to highlight how absurd the interpretation of quantum mechanics was at that time.

Since then, even the Copenhagen interpretation basically says that the "observation" happens already at the Geiger counter: "Analysis of an actual experiment found that measurement alone (for example by a Geiger counter) is sufficient to collapse a quantum wave function before there is any conscious observation of the measurement" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat#Copenh...

Consciousness might be worth thinking about. If it exists independently of the brain, it still must have effects on the brain, to have effects on human actions. These effects on the brain could be measurable. "This voltage here went up for an unknown reason".

Further, it pushes the question to another unobservable "magical" world. So, the consciousness exists in another world which is not directly measurable. Can we measure it indirectly? What is the structure of consciousness in the astral plane or however you are going to call it? If the whole goal of arguing that the consciousness exists in the astral plane is that "we can't study it", then that sounds a bit non-serious.