Comment by simondedalus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simondedalus | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

nature of consciousness is the biggest one IMO, precisely because it doesn't appear to be captured by "nature of existence." we have good physical/mathematical models on hand re: causation, such that we can at least start hypothesizing about what change is, where the universe came from, what if anything differentiates life from other motion, etc.

but consciousness is so categorically different that we can't even start. "well, brains are made up of cells and further of particles, and electricity works this way and here's some results from information theory and [UTTER MAGICAL WALL / ABYSSAL GAP] then there's the subjective experience of consciousness and will. and damnit we don't have anything like a logical or explanatory connection between these two sides, but for 'well, if i destroy 'someone else's' (??? what's this possessive in our fundamental terms???) body in the right way, it stops acting as if it's conscious like me, and also my own consciousness (which i can't describe with any specificity) changes when i do weird physical things involving drugs, injury, nutrition, um... and attitudes seem to matter, and there's definitely a subconscious, i guess, and...'..."

If you accept that other people are conscious like yourself, it seems like you have accepted the physical origin of consciousness. If you don't accept that the subjective experience of consciousness is just a product of physical events, then how do you avoid viewing yourself as the only conscious entity? You can be a solipsist or not, but you can't have it both ways. Experiencing thoughts from outside yourself is a common experience, but it's generally considered a delusion.

there's a gulf as big as the ocean between acceptance and explanation. we have good reason to assume that consciousness (whatever it is) depends on the physical. great, but what is it?

I wasn't taking sides on whether it's physical or not, so I wouldn't particularly agree with your statement.

I'm only trying to say that if you don't accept that consciousness is physical, you aren't accepting the symmetry between you and other minds, and can't reason from the assumption they have the same experience.

Once you contradict the known fact that you experience your own thoughts and not others, you descend into incoherence. It seems to me kind of like the issues people have with quantum weirdness. People are accustomed to assuming they know things for the sake of argument, but assuming you know the unknowable can sabotage your reasoning.

While I think it's an interesting argument, I don't agree that accepting that some other being than me can be conscious leads to having to accept the physical origin of consciousness a priori. If you look at Buddhism or any esoteric system, they essentially posit that consciousness is a unified field from which everything manifests, like light refracted through an (infinitely) complex array of lens. The spots of light where the light terminates look separate, but if you look at where the source of the light enters the lens, it all comes from a single source. The experience of having a separate consciousness and a body or mind or thoughts that I identify as me or an I that is not you or that car or that tree is essentially just an illusion because I don't have the awareness to be conscious of that unity. Just because something appears to be separate from one perspective doesn't mean that it's separate in reality, it's just that I experience it as separate due to my limited perspective. Consciousness is an experiential vehicle by nature. It doesn't slot into the scientific method all that well no matter how we try to cram it in.

Are you or are you not experiencing my consciousness right now? Either you claim to, in which case you're lying or delusional, or you don't claim to, in which case you can't say anything about its experiential nature without contradiction. I can say I am conscious all day, but that's just something I say - it can't prove anything to you. If I was being tortured, and I didn't communicate it to you, would you notice?

Logical incoherence starts with lying to yourself. That's not wisdom.

Edit: I can be a solipsist today and a materialist tomorrow - I'm not criticizing either viewpoint, just saying you can't reason based on believing in both simultaneously.

I think you capture what I was referring to when I said that limited awareness is what narrows consciousness -- it's like putting some of the ocean in a bucket. It's still part of the ocean, but it's not the whole ocean. What do logic and labels like solipsist and materialist have to do with consciousness? Yes, they're part of consciousness, but they're a construct: concepts and words that we're using to discuss our own unique experiences of consciousness. We can chase each other around forever in a rabbit hole of semantics about what the nature of consciousness is, and how my experience varies and is separate from your experience of it, but we're just looking at our buckets of water that we scooped up as if it's the entirety of the ocean. Meanwhile, the ocean is sloshing around us. It doesn't rely on us to be aware of it's oceanness to exist, it just is. Consciousness has more than enough space to accommodate your experience that relies very heavily on logical coherence to form a version of reality that is comfortable for you to function in, but that experiential frame isn't the ground of all being. It's just a lens that one can look through. Sure, I can't share you're exact experience, but I could empathize with you if I knew you were tortured. You can look through one lens and then another: consciousness is constantly changing and modulating our experiences, there's nothing static about it.

This is very much how I think about this issue. It's a problem of a completely different class than almost anything else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com