No, really—consciousness is worth thinking about

Consciousness is associated with thought, emotion, and sensation. Yet as neuroscience progresses, I think we will eventually functionalize thought, emotion, and sensation as biological processes.

Some may argue that our mental processes are fundamentally differently perceived from our external senses. But as a human being, we have internal sensations as well. We can feel internal pain and stomachaches. These have a fundamentally different sensation from the sensations that can be externally induced in us. Extrapolating further, we can say that thinking and feeling and other mental activity are mere sensations of the consciousness induced by the brain.

Before physics, there was a large role for divinities in the world. Gods and the Abrahamic God ruled Nature and Fortune, the parts of the world that we do not understand. But as human beings gained mastery and confidence over the external world, the domain of divinities shrank and shrank. We now attribute causes of phenomena to the natural world, rather than divinities; divinities used to be the natural law of the universe, today they have to be content with the supernatural.

Regardless of the philosophical justifications of consciousness, I see it going the way of divinities. The popularity of consciousness will wane as mental functions and mental states and cognition are understood. Societies will begin to use neuroscientific explanations to justify perception and behavior that provide actionable innovation and correction instead of attributing them to black-box consciousness.

When that happens, the idea of consciousness will, I think, seem as absurd as divinities.

In fact, a tiny minority of the comments in that thread were dismissive of consciousness as an interesting topic of thought. Only one of the comments quoted in this post could reasonably be interpreted as dismissive, but even that one had interesting points to make.

For a most amusing take on the p-zombie idea, see:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/pn/zombies_the_movie/

(Though humorous, it's the capstone to a series of articles on p-zombies: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Zombies_(sequence) )

That's good to know. I still think the term 'pseudoscience' is thrown around a bit too loosely though. There's falsifiability as a criterion for scientific theories sure, but building to a full out 'theory' requires quite a bit of maturity on the part of the 'science'. Some ideas fail at the onset like homeopathy, but others might have to be investigated more thoroughly before knowing for sure. The only thing I generally have against the 'pseudoscience' label is the effect it has on people that dissuade them from following anything approaching a certain line of reasoning sometimes. As with personality types, the Myers-Briggs framework might be bunk, but the underlying idea could be feasible, thinking of it as the emergence of certain patterns and algorithms from genetics and neurological connections; after all, we are seeing something that might end up being quite like this in the realm of IQ. But I digress.

The point is that we are approaching a future that is going to need more and more cross-disciplinary knowledge and approaches to really figure things out, and the loud belittlement and stigmatization of general approaches is a bit discerning to see around circles of intellectual people.

Claiming consciousness does not come from the brain is just silly nonsense from before we had modern biology. Early philosophers thought the brain was for cooling blood. Even if you want to make up quantum superposition nonsense or whatever other big words you can find the place it is occurring is still inarguably the brain.

It's OK to go talk about useless, meaningless, non-diagnostic bullshit after that. But you should realize you are just being religious and not talking about anything worthwhile that then has meaning toward physical structures. You should no longer talk about the brain after that because you are just throwing in physical terms to try to get people who would otherwise dismiss you to pay attention.