Good read on consciousness

[Apollo]

[onlinebiker]

Consciousness is for people who can handle large volumes of alcohol....

[The Grand Nudger]

It reads like it was written by an illusionist who objects to the use of the term illusion. I think the author is confused, but very passionate about things not being illusions.

[HappySkeptic]

I enjoyed the essay. It doesn't make a lot of claims, so it is easy to agree.

I have some attachment to the "consciousness is an illusion" idea, but I prefer to think of it as an emergent process.

It is an illusion in the sense that the mind is presenting it to us a some sort of whole. Our "self". That presentation hides the complex underpinnings of what the mind is doing, and how our consciousness is a narrow filtered view of the actions of the mind.

The brain does what it does. It needs the conscious mind to make decisions and game what-if scenarios. The mind filters the noise down to those things it needs "us" to be aware of.

I think that the "self" is an evolutionary construct that our survival relies on, and consciousness is a high-level emergent process. As the essay says, we will know more when we probe the limits of AI, and our knowledge of neuro-biology. There will always be a place for philosophers as "story tellers", but science is the tool that will best inform religion and mysticism.

[GrandizerII]

Admittedly, my reading is limited on the topic of consciousness. Nevertheless, I have read various thoughts shared by couple sides to this debate, and I wonder if there is a major miscommunication happening between those two sides.

Sean Carroll, who is an emergentist when it comes to the mind, sees consciousness as another way of expressing reality at a particular level of analysis. In effect, he is in agreement with a lot of thinkers who lean towards a strictly materialist point of view. On the other hand, you have David Chalmers (famous for coining the phrase "the hard problem" when it comes to consciousness) and based on what little I've read from him, it does seem like some people (and as smart as they are) just don't seem to appreciate what the difficulty is exactly and seem to be focusing on some different aspect that David Chalmers and other thinkers like him aren't referring to when it comes to the hard problem.

As for the illusionist perspective, which isn't that different from the emergentist perspective really (I think), it's basically the same thing. There appears to be a lack of appreciation of what the problem is.

[The Grand Nudger]

In the illusionist perspective, consciousness isn't an emergent phenomena, phenomenal experience is a misrepresentation of symbolic language.

It's subtle, but important. Yes, the illusionist position agrees that all of this machinery is emergent in the sense that it arose by naturally self organizing means - but qualia are not meaningfully real in the illusionists pov. That's part of the machine, not an object being observed...not something that any "we" apprehends. Not that there is a you experiencing what it's like to be - that this is a report of states meaningful to the operation of our brain but not necessarily tied to the content of the report.

One of the problems right now, the meta-illusion problem, is that it's looking for all the world like either the illusionists or the dualists have it right. Unless we find the little man that amounts to us somewhere in there, consciousness is not at all like it reports itself to be..or it's made of stuff that we simply cannot detect. We intuitively recoil at illusionism...but the dualists never seem to get anything right. Rock and a hard place.

[Duty]

"The only times we are conscious are when we are thinking about consciousness." tm

[Jehanne]

If hard determinism (e.g., "no free will") is, in fact (philosophical realism) true, how could one ever know that?  But, in not knowing something to be true, does such make it not true?  It's kind of like a Cosmos that had no beginning, and is infinite, both in time and space, into the past.  Such may be true, but how could we ever know such?

The problem with saying that free will exists is, in fact, it does not, at least in certain circumstances.  A clinician could go on and on (and, on) here, but the fact is that no one (not even Trump or his most adherent supporters) would accuse an Alzheimer's patient of having "chosen" to have forgotten the names of his/her grandchildren (or, the fact that they have grandchildren.)

That our brains create our minds (hence, no brain, no mind) is the simplest explanation of reality.  From the Conservation Laws at one end ("Does a soul violate the Conservation of Electric Charge?") to Broca's Aphasia at the the other with countless neurological, pharmacological or other fMRI studies in between, not to mention consciousness in animals, one can and should conclude that an immaterial soul does not exist, at least to the extant that one can and should conclude the fairies do not exist.  That atheistic materialism is falsifiable (an OBE where one "sees" remotely concealed objects) means that it is, from a scientific POV, at least testable.  As with the 2020 election results, some people in our Society have shown that they are capable of believing almost anything.

[The Grand Nudger]

To be really careful with the knife, illusionism can be, at least it's asserted to be by some of it's most well known advocates, compatible with free will.

[Jehanne]

To be really careful with the knife, illusionism can be, at least it's asserted to be by some of it's most well known advocates, compatible with free will.

I am not a compatibilist; quasi-hard determinism would be my POV.  It's unknowable and unprovable, but, it's likely true; and, tragically, countless care centers and group homes (not to mention prisons and death rows) are filled with salient examples.