Good read on consciousness

[GrandizerII]

Hypothesized, but how would you even demonstrate that, given the difficulty of doing so with other human beings?

Demonstrating existent and evolved control schemas in organisms (and human organisms) is trivially easy.  That part isn't hypothesis, it's an observed feature that drives well understood behaviors which we build into machines for commercial application.  We try all sorts of things to figure this stuff out.  Mind altering substances and stimuli, physical interruption (ie, snip snip until someone wholly loses the experience of x), mental interference (attention exhaustion tests).  As I mentioned before - this thing that you think makes no sense has observational data and experimental support.  ASTm specifically, is an evolutionary theory of the mechanics of the report - and it's maintained by some that if the mechanics can be described without ever finding or needing to refer to this phenomenological experience stuff...maybe it's not there, no matter how much we insist.  Assuming we did find that tomorrow and some other explanation became available - it would still be a valid and productive theory for how a non conscious machine could appear to observers and to the machine itself, to be conscious, as well as how lower organism™ without that thing we find manage to produce similar behaviors.

You seem to be talking about access consciousness, and thereby treating consciousness as something that does not involve qualia.

So let me try again. How can you demonstrate that what you call "illusion" (this pseudo-phenomenal thingy) is something that is experienced by other beings, human or not?

More importantly, how does the brain conjure up that what you call "illusion"?

Whatever other beings may or may not possess, from a first-person-perspective, some beings can know they have their own [phenomenal] consciousness because that is exactly what they are experiencing. It's not a matter of making false attributions here; if you directly experience, then your experience is real and any report about this experience by revealing this experience is accurate, no matter if the report is nevertheless not an accurate report of what's really happening physically in the CNS or in the world "out there".

Otoh, insisting that a description is wrong because it doesn't include some asserted thing, rather than for it being an inaccurate description of the process which generates the effect, is wrong headed.  The famous "I see you've left no place for god in your model" quote comes to mind.  The illusionists are suggesting that they don't need the ghost to explain why we think it exists, no more than a magician needs magic to explain pulling a rabbit from a hat.  Hence, illusionism.  That it is one thing with a very real set of properties a, inaccurately representing itself as another thing with an illusory set of properties b.

This is ridiculous. One's own consciousness (or at least in my case) isn't something I'm just simply asserting. It's what I'm directly experiencing, it's this first-person-perspective that I'm experiencing that I'm absolutely certain that I have, regardless of what its nature may be and regardless of what "I" exactly is. This is nothing like forcing god into the equation. It's something one should reasonably accept by default, not accept that it's not really real.

Then there's no problem, because it does make sense.  If it's not real in the sense that physical objects are real, then all forms of realism are false and illusionism is true by fiat.  First person perspetive, part of the illusion.  There's no person in there to posess a perspective, and feel what it;s like to have perspective - though there very much is a perspective apparatus in access cognition that swirls around the instantiation of the associated sense organs.  We see from "our eyes" the kinds of things our eyes would see (and things that aren't there, and sometimes we fail to see the kinds of things we normally would which are), not another persons eyes, for fairly obvious reasons.  

You're fucking with me, lol. "I" am the person who possesses this perspective. There's no person "in there", it's "me" who is experiencing it.

And speaking of seeing stuff, I can vividly right now see the words I'm typing on screen. How does this vividness come about? I've yet to see anyone have a satisfactory answer to questions like this.

The "you",  is the little man™, and you invoked it a few words after you said there wasn't one.  That, doesn't make sense.  Ultimately, though, this may boil down to problems with semantics and how talking about these things with words based on folklore in ignorance of the operation of the brain creates the appearance of issues where none exist.  There is nothing wrong with suggesting that our brains are unconscious machines from start to finish.  Illusionism doesn't change anything about you.  Knowing how the sausage is made doesn't change the sausage or stop us from eating it.  Rather than insisting that it doesn't make sense, or that it cannot possibly be true because reports of consciousness just  must be  [insert your anecdotal report of the operation of your own brain here]...can you explain why you think that even if  it did make sense and is possible..it isn't true?

Huh? I don't know how to answer such a question. If it somehow did make sense and is possible, then it can be true. But would I believe it true, I don't know.

None of that changes my position that this doesn't make sense. I don't know what it is that illusionists do exactly when arguing their position, but it comes off to me as if they don't like the idea of something that appears to be "non-physical" be real, so they've come up with this extreme reductionist view called illusionism that they can be satisfied with. If it's not physical, it's not real, let's scratch that away and say well, we're just confused about it, that's why we think it's real, but it's not! Problem solved!

Or maybe they really are p-zombies and genuinely don't possess [phenomenal] consciousness, so they think this must be the case with everyone else as well. Half-joking here, but you never know ...

Any assertion that leans on a you experiencing something would first need to provide the you - and it would be an additional step to show that whatever this you was were actually capable of the full list of phenomenological experiences it reports.

I'm the "you" (or, rather, "me") you're looking for, but the problem is you can't experience "me", so I can't provide you with "me". But just because you can't see "me" doesn't mean therefore, there is no "me" that experiences.

Let me ask you this, suppose that we fnd something even remotely close and..for the most part, things are real and do work as described - but we find a few reports of phenomenological experience that we have reason to believe the organism would be incapable of genuinely reporting?  Which is to say..sure, real us, with real experiences, but we physically -couldn't- be having this set of experiences that we, nevertheless, report.  What then?  Would we just say.."well..it's just the one, or two, or twenty, or profligate billions.  These others are still legit and we don't suspect them at all."

How can one get to the point of being able to find "a few reports of phenomenological experience that we have reason to believe the organism would be incapable of genuinely reporting"? Having a hard time following the line of thinking behind questions like this. If the organism is incapable of reporting some type of experience, then it wouldn't be able to do so, and any reports (physical?) that you find of such a contradiction would have be to false (if I'm getting your question right).

Between emergentism and pan-psychism, a much finer distinction than the above, I trend towards emergentism - I do believe that any organization of matter which is meaningfully and functionally equivalent to a brain should be able to do brain stuff, no matter what kind of stuff it is - but I note that not all arrangements of matter are equivalent in ability or potential function.  I don't think that it's possible for a dust cloud to be conscious, no matter how many gajillions of particles of dirt are arranged in a complex pattern (or incredibly useful arbitrary).  I would personally expect to find consciousness wherever it could exist - for it to be relatively common - if it's a natural phenomenon - but not ubiquitous.

Should be able to do "brain stuff" including the qualia we believe we experience, what illusionists call "illusion"?

The reason I find panpsychism interesting is that it addresses the hard problem by saying, well, the phenomenological experiences we have (while linked to our brains in some relational manner) are possible because, by nature, certain bodies of matter (if not all) possess at least some basic form of perspective. Somehow, something about the brain (or anything similar to it) just amps up this perspective and makes it into what we're used to calling consciousness.

So I like this idea, and if pushed, will opt for panpsychism as an answer. However, one of the problems with it is it's not really clear what panpsychists mean by such things as "element" or "building block" of the mind or whatever, since it's hard to find a good analogy among the physical stuff. And then there's the combination problem: how does "me" as a whole come to have my own "brand of consciousness"?

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Perhaps so, but this view nevertheless does not deal with the hard problem very well, and so despite explanatory strengths that may come with the emergentist view, the fact that this view has no conceivable (atm) solution for the hard problem while other views regarding the mind do (apparently) suggests that perhaps we may need to reconsider the soundness of this view.

In my opinion, the hard problem is like a Cosmos that had no beginning.  It's a paradox, and one that may simply be unknown and unknowable, but, nevertheless, at the same time it's reality.  I cannot comprehend Broca's Aphasia, and yet, numerous examples of such are occurring each and every day.  One cannot experience the loss of language while at the same time articulate what it feels like not being able to speak or comprehend speech.

Well, depends on whether Broca's aphasia entails a complete loss of language or not (and whether it's really just one region or more regions in the brain in charge of all sorts of language production). I never thought that to be confusing when I was studying it back when I majored in psychology.