Comment by justinpombrio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justinpombrio | Hacker News Reader

I'm completely lost. What does it mean to be conscious of something, but unaware of it? I thought those were synonyms.

The article asks this question:

> Consider your breathing right now: the sensation of air flowing through your nostrils, the movements of your diaphragm, etcetera. Were you not experiencing these sensations a moment ago, before I directed your attention to them? Or were you just unaware that you were experiencing them all along? By directing your attention to these sensations, did I make them conscious or did I simply cause you to experience the extra quality of knowing that the sensations were conscious?

Implicitly saying that "experience" and "consciousness" should be defined such that I experienced and was conscious of those sensations even though I was not aware of them. Thus, using the terminology of the article, I am currently conscious of a ton of things all at once:

The feeling of my feet on the floor, my butt in the seat, my tongue in my mouth, the sound of my typing, and of the rattling behind me, and of the rumbling of the train, the vibrations of the train, the propioceptive feeling of the positions of my limbs, the slight but distinctive smell of mass transit.

Is this right? Is "consciousness" in the sense of the article just a synonym for "anything the brain processes"?

> Is "consciousness" in the sense of the article just a synonym for "anything the brain processes"?

And is able to describe that thing, even if just to itself.

Have you ever experienced in a dream, being able to do some wondrous thing - write music, feel a wall from a distance, whatever. In the dream you feel that ability. But when you wake up, while you remember dreaming about it, you can not actually make yourself re-experience it. (For example: Describe the song you wrote.)

That's what the author claims is the difference between conscious and not conscious. (If I understood him correctly.)

If you have conscious thought, you can cause your mind to experience any sensation you have already had. A non-conscious being can not do that, they can only experience what they experience right this moment.

In your dream example, I remember the music. But in the article's example, I don't even remember my breath. Since I don't remember it, I cannot recall it. So while that's a nice distinction, it doesn't seem to be what the article was trying to get at.

Point taken. One reading of the article is that meta-consciousness is the new consciousness (whatever that was).

I think of consciousness as being 'what you are paying attention to and what it is like'. One problem with this is that when you're attending sufficiently strongly to something you can't actually notice what it is like; there isn't enough bandwidth free. Yet some of the associated ideas ('qualia') may linger in working memory for a more relaxed examination afterwards. Which proves that you were paying attention and that mental work was going on. (Perhaps it also shows that trying too hard is counter-productive due to lack of integration with the rest of the mind.)

Well there is attention too.

Selecting from that stream, is that the over consciousness?

And what chooses which stream to pay attention to?

It's recursive and mind bending.

I'd define consciousness as "anything the brain processes", where the goal is adaptation of the organism to the environment. It's very much about goal driven behavior.

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