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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, but this barely scratches the surface.

The key problem of consciousness is not what we have an experience of (eg. "you're a real thing that thinks and feels"). It's the fact that it is possible to have any experience at all.

Yes, it seems quite likely that a great deal of what we are conscious of is an "illusion" created in our brains, albeit some rather handy illusions. But that doesn't get even one step closer to the core philosophical problem of how we (or anything else) is able to experience anything at all (including the illusion of being a real thing that thinks and feels)

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You don't have an experience. You might think you do, but I see no scientific reason to believe you.

What you might have is an algorithm in your brain telling you that there is a self experiencing the world. But in reality you're just a collection of sub atomic particles.

Edit: Why should I take your claim of conscious experience any more seriously than my computer's who's screen is currently reading: "I AM CONSCIOUS" from a notepad?

Is the only difference that I told the computer to say it, where as you are told by your genetics to say and think it?

I'm not asking you to take my claims about my own conscious experience seriously at all. There's no need to cross the boundaries of self at all.

The central problem of consciousness is about how you have an experience (even if it is an illusion). Unless you don't have any experience of anything, in which case I'm confident that we'd deem you non-conscious and therefore your existence to be of not much relevance to the question at hand.

Whether or not your experience is an illusion or not, it is an experience. And it is experience ("qualia" in the philosophy of consciousness) that is the core question here.

>core philosophical problem of how we (or anything else) is able to experience anything at all

By `how` you mean the mechanics of it or something else?

> By `how` you mean the mechanics of it or something else?

He means something else, but human language really has a problem of expressing this.

I'd say he means what remains to be explained once you have explained the mechanical how.

To where or what or who are the experiences relaid? What is it?

Also known as the question of "what the hell is I".

Both the brain and a chair are made of the same fundamental particles, following the same physics. Yet, no one believes the chair experiences anything. The core problem of the materialist frame is why the atoms that make up the brain are able to experience anything.

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