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How does consciousness even make sense?

niklasbuehler.com

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Re: How does consciousness even make sense?

#31

Post by ncmncm »

kordlessagain wrote: post #18

Defining consciousness will come down to doing so simply. Consciousness is emergent given lack of awareness equals lack of consciousness, especially when the lack of awareness is extended to seeing and hearing, or not. Consciousness emerges from awareness of objects, vision, hearing, thinking mind. Who here can visualize an apple in their mind, literally seeing it as if existed and was being perceived by the eye (a s…

> Who here can visualize an apple in their mind, literally seeing it as if existed and was being perceived by the eye (a sense organ)?

Everyone. What you think you are seeing as a whole is your hallucination based on fragmentary sensory input. Same for everything else you think you see around you.

Doing it without corresponding sensory input requires practice, drugs, sleep, unusual brain development, or other techniques, because hallucinating things not there is suppressed for obvious reasons. When that suppression fails, we see things not there, such as Elvis on a piece of toast.

Re: How does consciousness even make sense?

#32

Post by ncmncm »

arnoooooo wrote: post #25
dTal wrote: post #4

>I can’t really grasp that. Do my thoughts make sense? Where’s the flaw? This is the "Argument from Incredulity by Implausible Consciousness Substrate"[0]. Other examples include Searle's Chinese Room, and the China Brain thought experiment (what is it with China?). To your credit, you've immediately spotted the problem - how is the actual human brain any different? It's also some sort of broadly mechanistic physical…

I fail to see how you're not just waving hands. You assume that consciousness is an emergent property of matter, you think it's plausible, but you can't explain it or prove it.

Anything that happened, can.

Re: How does consciousness even make sense?

#33

Post by ncmncm »

mikhailfranco wrote: post #22
D-Coder wrote: post #3

I read it. How does this article even make sense?

There seems to be a flurry of these articles posted to HN, which are vague, loquacious, superficial, obtuse, poorly punctuated, occasionally excessively poly-syllabic, repetitive, colloquial and plausible, yet ultimately nonsensical. We need a new adjective for what it is to be like GPT-3 ... disgenerative? misformational? cyberblathering? babble streaming? thesaurus gargling?

Then the real question is, why does GPT-3 think consciousness is mysterious?

Re: How does consciousness even make sense?

#34

Post by ncmncm »

zarmin wrote: post #15

Consciousness is fundamental, not emergent.

Only your own consciousness is fundamental, i.e. directly experienced. All others are deduced to exist, from clues. But your own consciousness's origin is not fundamental; that is also deduced from clues (i.e., "apparently stuff that exists once didn't").

But any model of our own consciousness that fails to encompass others' as similar is sterile. We are all found to have brains; and damage to brains, or even to the stuff that feeds brains, alters or snuffs out consciousness. Brains turn out to be made of nerve cells, that are like other cells but specialized for processing information. Stimulating an individual nerve cell can trigger a thought, memory or sensation, repeatably. QED, consciousness is a phenomenon of nerve cells processing information.

Anything else is woo.

How you would build a thing that is conscious is not known. But we have existence proof that it's possible, so the rest is a matter of engineering. Philosophers and deists can do whatever the hell they want, but will have nothing meaningful to contribute.

Re: How does consciousness even make sense?

#35

Post by mdpm »

Consciousness is a property we ascribe to our own awareness of our awareness. As we are part of the universe, if consciousness is a thing, it is then a property of the universe, not just the human mind.

The human mind is a plastic, adaptive system, which is shaped by senses that consume the universe and which attempt to model the universe. It is past and present interlocked - causality, bound up in tight knots of matter.

This is the universe, being aware of itself. It is perhaps not capable of being understood, just reveled in.

Re: How does consciousness even make sense?

#37

Post by slolean13 »

consciousness; we can take different takes on it viz. religion, philosophical, cognitive sciences and evolutionary biology.

the most satisfactory explanation that i got was from cognitive sciences(https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/11/eaaz0087)or conscience as a side effect of brain's electrical and magnetic field and evolutionary biology(Attention Schema Theory).

AST: I am going to write a small time line for development of our brain(correct me if i am wrong)

Claim: This happened due to too much information processing! As complex organism starts observing too much information; there were competition among neurons which leads to

(a)Selective Signal Enhancement (eg Hydra)---> (b) Centralized Controller for Coordination (Tectum): this is for overt/default attention controls eyes, head and is found both mammals and reptiles ---> (c) wulst(in reptiles) and cortex(in mammals): this is for covert attention, meaning you don't have to attend to the stimuli to process it; you can think about the sound coming from your behind without looking at it!

This is the main difference tectum is still in both of us and our response to most of the stimuli is controlled by it, but deep processing, thinking is done by the cortex which models it on a SCHEMA(a workflow)[neural pathways/consciousness] nobody knows but we tend to focus on this schema to do the deep processing [covert attention]

We make a sense of self using this; other animals as well! We also associate ourselves with others using this; language was a direct consequence of this. As we extended a communication system of our brain to others!

Now; your statement if a set of stones can have conscience? Yes it can have; over the time if this system of stones will be observed; with some associated meaning to it states[arranged in circle or square]; someone can argue that it is aware!

You can look at universe as a set of rocks; the periodic movements; it's aware!? maybe :)

Re: How does consciousness even make sense?

#38

Post by flipcoder »

Consciousness is mysterious, but I find it even more mysterious that the universe had the capacity for consciousness to even exist in the first place. How does something start with capacity to have first-person awareness of itself? It seems almost magical.
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