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Comment by mooseburger | Hacker News Reader

> Maybe that belief that I am conscious is flawed and merely an illusion

That's the Dennett nonsense. Of course our sense inputs are an illusion, it's that there is anything being perceived at all that is the mystery! :

DENNETT: So you see, Socrates, consciousness is an illusion.

SOCRATES: I see, but I need to clarify something. What do you mean by illusion?

DENNETT: An illusion is an appearance contrary to reality.

SOCRATES: And what is an appearance?

DENNETT: An appearance is something that is apprehended by an observer.

SOCRATES: So consciousness is something that is apprehended by an observer which is contrary to reality.

DENNETT: But that cannot be, because then the observer would have to be conscious.

SOCRATES: Therefore, consciousness cannot be an illusion!

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This makes no sense to me.

The point I was making is that we do not know what consciousness actually is. Until we do, we have no way of telling whether my impression of my own consciousness has any reasonable relation to the reality of it. It is meaningless to try to determine whether or not it is an illusion without first having an understanding of what consciousness is.

More directly to the argument I was addressing, the point is that whether or not the commenter I replied to is right and there'd be no "me" that could live on forever, that is really rather irrelevant to the "me" that believes I am conscious.

In other words: While I need clarity in what consciousness is to be able to even begin to address whether or not what I have is truly consciousness, it really doesn't matter to the question of whether or not whatever I am sees value in a process that'd let me live on.

You don't have an impression of your own consciousness (your conscious awareness) to begin with. You just perceive stuff. How exactly could you not have conscious awareness?

We can't even meaningfully answer that question without an understanding of what consciousness is first.

Consciousness appears to us as if we are distinct entities, with a spatial and temporal existence, operating on sensory input and memory. We don't know if any of that is true - we don't know if there is any persistent entity, whether spatially or temporally.

I'm not saying there's "nothing" that we could label consciousness. I'm saying we have no way of suggesting whether or not our idea of ourselves as an entity that experiences events and acts on them (even just mentally) is meaningfully connected to reality.

My point in making that argument is that it doesn't matter - absent any better information, the only thing that makes sense for us is to act on the basis that our consciousness is real, and interact with people on the basis that they're real and conscious, because it doesn't matter whether or not it is an illusion if we can not "see past the veil".

This is incidentally also the classical response to philosophical idealism: Sure, maybe all our senses lie to us, but since everything acts as if we're in a materialist world, it doesn't matter.

It remains possible that at some point we find something that lets us lift the veil, and peer out into something "outside" our present reality. But that possibility does not change anything until and unless it becomes reality.

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