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Comment by tomrod | Hacker News Reader

> how are you so sure that anyone else besides you is actually conscious ? you might be the only conscious being in the universe. the whole universe is yours. you've already traveled the entire thing.

Because other's express things that I in my wildest dreams couldn't have imagined.

I think solipsism dies when epistemic humility comes into the picture.

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i never really get the notion people sometimes have that consciousness arises from a specific, physically identifiable structure in the brain, where a person actually seems to have a "self", looking out of their eyes from inside their heads, and furthermore is "atomic" in that sense; it can't be split in half (because which half would the "self" be present in then?), yet there can exist no structure that produces the same output without the "they are looking out of their eyes from inside their heads" part.

"self looking outside of my head" strikes me as so completely paradoxical that explanations such as each consciousness is its own universe seem just as plausible as any other. it does not mean the person you are talking to is not conscious, just that their consciousness is playing out in a parallel copied universe.

I actually really enjoyed some of Sam Harris' "Waking Up" meditation series for this. Not a usual activity for me. However, I greatly enjoyed reflecting on the notion of "there is no self."

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CN-_zzHpcdM

Yes the "self" is an illusion, but at least for me, there's an emergent illusion/whatever of "hey im inside this head looking out", which we claim arises from a physical brain structure. if this structure were divided in some way, does my current "self" vanish and two new consciousnesses arise? do those new consciousnesses have memory, so one is on one side of the room, the other is on the other ? at what point is my current "self" no longer viable such that it vanishes?

edit: looks like HN is throttling me again. hmm but not edits. well that's fun

Weird. Your comment came through just fine.

I see your thought on emergence of self. Almost like self is equivalent to consciousness. Without a notion of self, you are part of a larger system with will.

Stemming the claim that there is no free will, I know the argument, but don't agree to it as what we observe (that people make choices at least some of the time) goes against claimed theory (that our choices are random chemistry-driven outcomes based on state of the world). I'm not terribly deep in the area, though, and welcome correction or thoughts.

In the past, this was understood to be the soul and you are correct when you describe it as atomic, though depending on which tradition is describing the soul it can have further attributes. My username is based on such a tradition -- the Nous (pronounced like noose) is considered the eye of the soul. Extrapolating that further, we focus the eye of our soul on whatever we want to, which can be ourselves, worldly aspirations, or spiritual aspirations.

This would be considered the free will we are given at the basest level - we get to choose what we focus our soul on, and that can be changed at any moment. Such a tradition would say that since we are a body/soul composite, whatever we focus our soul on, our body willingly and immediately focuses on as well, for good or ill.

If I was never exposed to the idea that the brain is where all our thinking occurs and believed instead that the brain was an organ for cooling the blood and the real center of my “soul” was my liver or something: Would I still feel like my “self” is in my head looking out my eyes?

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