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Comment by trts | Hacker News Reader

Having recently been swept into a youtube loop on this subject, not much seems to have been learned since this article was published.

It's fascinating just how vast the gap is. There is seemingly no theory of consciousness that has any testable hypotheses. It's quite engaging to hear some of our most public intellectuals talk about what to make of that.

Imagination is pretty much the only thing that fills that void today.

Some of my favorite speakers on the topic have been Dennett, Hoffman, Tononi and Penrose.

Just look at some of the contributors on the playlist below! And they know almost as little as I do. It's a fun and mindbending topic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh7rCV0zi1Q&list=RDCMUCl9StM...

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Far and away the most interesting theory on this topic for me is from Hoffman. I recent read his fascinating book The Case Against Reality - mind blown pretty much sums up my experience of the book. In short he advocates that consciousness is fundamental and that what we experience as the material world...people, objects, atoms is the product of our consciousness and not the other way around. Space time he argues is not fundamental.

Blowing minds is a cheap trick, cult leaders do it, politicans do it. These books are exciting, it's like finding out that Harry Potter is real, but it's all intellectually lazy. There are more plot holes than plot in these books.

Never trust entirely anything about consciousness or physics that's not boring and downright indecipherable to the layman.

I agree about not trusting entirely anything about consciousness. I said Hoffman's theory was fascinating, not that I bought it entirely as there are too many unanswered questions. But for me it was a paradigm shift in terms of how one could look at what we call reality. Hoffman is a serious scientist a professor emeritus at UC Irvine with impressive credentials in neuroscience and cognitive psychology.

I'll say this colloquially and rhetorically (as I have little real interest in what the probably contorted answer might be), but I wonder how it can possibly account for the vast early period of time since the big bang when there was no consciousness.

Or was consciousness-created reality all made up on the spot on the birth of the first conscience?

And how has it been kept consistent through the life of all different consciences?

I think the simple fact that, for example, separated tribes of people have lived for millennium within a physically identical world is kinda a dead give-away that reality lives independently of consciousness.

Based on Hoffman's theory the reason there is consistency in how the world is viewed and experienced across tribes is because we are born with similar gear - something akin to a built in VR headset. Hoffman gives several examples in the book of objects we create on the fly that are not really there - we call them visual illusions - based on our unconscious visual intelligence logic rules.

So, hum, multiple consciousnesses create the same reality because our bodies, which are part of reality, are similar? Sounds to me this implies reality came first, but I'm just a simple man, not a book-writing philosopher.

... and the good old "visual illusions therefore 'anything'". About the level of argument sophistication I expected.

It doesn't seem so surprising to me that there doesn't exist a compelling theory for something without a good definition: what is "consciousness"?

Your subjective first person experiences. The what it's like for you to perceive, imagine, remember, dream. The reds, sounds, tastes, smells and feels of your experiences. There are precise philosophical terms for the above. Qualia and phenomenal are two such terms.

Science keeps advancing steadily on understanding consciousness, but you won't find any of it on Youtube or from these popular science or philosophy writers and speakers.

You find it on Researchgate and such, start from a paper and chase down the citations.

> Science keeps advancing steadily on understanding consciousness

The perfect place to prove that is by putting a few citations in your comment. Better to show than tell.

I don't have a paper that has it all, I recommend reading as many as you can and find interesting just to get a picture.

You may start here, follow the citations and their references.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221703137_Thermodyn...

If you are looking for information about current research into consciousness, there is a book, The Hidden Spring by Mark Solms.

He gave a talk organised by The Royal Institution that talked about case studies that explore where consciousness comes from.

I hope this is helpful.

https://youtu.be/CmuYrnOVmfk

Problem is, a lot of papers won't be very good. Do you have some recommendation?

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