Comment by lassoiat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lassoiat | Hacker News Reader

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This is why the concept of consciousness is largely nonsense.

The person that is blacked out is not unconscious. They just are not storing memories in order to remember the experience after the fact.

Can you see it? It is right in front of you that consciousness doesn't exist. It is right in your own example. It is a 21st century superstition and English language flaw. People cling to this idea the way people use to cling to the idea of a soul and some still do.

Like the soul, if you just get rid of the idea and word, nothing changes other than clarity in the language of what we are actually talking about instead of this ill-defined nonsense.

Do animals have a soul? It is the same question.

To come at it a different way. We can't be free of superstition and nonsense in 2024. There must be things we believe are true that simply aren't true and will look silly 300 years from now. What else do people believe in so admittedly in 2024 even though there is not just zero evidence for but we can't even define what we are talking about? It is prime suspect #1 to me when it comes to this category.

There is a condition called aphantasia, in which people are unable to visualise things, but are perfectly capable of doing visual tasks, such as art.

The question "is this animal conscious" is quite close to a question "does this person have aphantasia", and both seem to be perfectly valid and answerable.

I'm not fully grasping the experiment your proposing here

You still have to explain why you "see out of your eyes", cause if consciousness doesn't exist, then why the universe doesn't happen silently without an "observer" somehow connected to every complex enough area. Soul is just the closest, religiously crippled interpretation of this idea.

Even if you are the only object in the universe that isn't a p-zombie, you still have it at your end. Why doesn't your physical body operate without "you" being in it most of the time?

I somewhat agree with you. The concept of consciousness needs rethinking. A better definition I think is to say an entity or system is conscious to the extent it’s world model is encompassing / “complete” and self-conscious when its world model includes itself and its own internal states. By this definition there are many continuous levels of consciousness and self-consciousness and these attributes are not binary all vs nothing. As for the soul a better definition for the soul of something is the information required to recreate it. If due to lossy compression or information corruption you can only recreate an approximation then some fraction of the original soul has been lost.

I think the self can come and go. I don't think a blacked out person is always unconscious, but they do seem to lack a subjective self while sometimes still being clinically awake and engaging in complex behavior. When the subjective self comes back online later, it makes understanding the self easier for them by creating contrast.

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