Comment by jngreenlee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jngreenlee | Hacker News Reader

Interesting! I am not a nueroscientist, but I think about this sort of thing a lot (a very self referencial activity!)

One thing I've come to believe is in line with (what this article presents as) the paper's thesis, and that is the following:

Consciousness is best described as a highest order observation process that is non-continuous. Somewhat like a serverless or virtual instance, it can pop in and out of use as needed, any maybe many times a second.

These brief 'flashes' of highest order observation, when observed by the person, blend to form a continuous experience, but it's really just a smoothing function, and an illusion.

Consider how you can be tricked into believing something was there in a memory that helps explain a story, even when it wasn't. The mind is not as precise as we want to believe!

Consciousness is therefore not the root, and persistent experience! It's weird, but it actually ends up explaining a lot of personal life experiences a little better.

Listen to what you said... the highest order observation, "when ovserved by the person" is an illusion.

This implies that there is someone ("the person") observing the highest order observation -- making it not the highest order.

And to be an illusion there needs to be someone to fool in the first place.

Try to get that language out of your stataments and then see if you can say ANYTHING AT ALL about consciousness! :-)

Spot on, and that's half the fun for an amateur in this domain!

Think about it this way: It's an illusion, but the illusion is real.

Or think about it this way: We simulate a reality (the illusion).

Or how about this. We are pattern recognizing feedback loops (illusion)

Do we really need to know what consciousness is as a thing or have we perhaps by now realized that question doesn't really make sense because consciousness is not a thing. It doesn't exist somewhere. It's a concept we use to describe phenomena but which through language can always only be a reduction of reality.

Yep, I think our ideas are shaped by our language.

Same thing with the idea of "existence". It actually requires consciousness to make any sense. The two concepts are actually dual of each other!

Thought experiment: if I told you about a parallel universe which you would never be able to detect, or deduce from any phenomena in this one ... how is then saying "it exists" different from saying "it doesn't exist?"

Now imagine this world with no conscious observers. How is its existence any different from that of the hypothetical parallel universe?

In short - our very concepts of existence and consciousness are really influenced by the language we use.

Now an interesting question: can you pose ANY question about consciousness or existence that doesn't have a trivial answer, if you are CAREFUL to avoid all ambiguity in your language?

I believe that, from an atheist point of view, there IS no root you can get at. Everything is relative. When you are careful to state the subject and object of a sentence everything becomes trivially obvious.

The trouble is when you take a ternary relation (eg A should do B if A wants C to happen) and omit one of the terms. Then you get mystical wondering "How do we ground the moral imperative that A should do B?" Once you are careful to include all the input variables, morality and everything else becomes relative and the statements are merely relations. Then you get something like logical positivism.

The main question still remains - WHY are things the way they are, so consistent? And atheists may never know! :)

The difference between the two isn't important (there is no objective difference between saying either). The fact that someone is asking the question is what's important.

And then the real question IMO becomes what are useful questions to ask, rather than what is the answer.

Can see you edited so let me add that i am also living without a religion. I agree that everything is subjective, but that doesent mean we can't build moral or ethical foundations for how we live together. There are plenty of shared foundation even if its an illusion to build upon.

It's funny how on one hand consciousness may be the only thing you can be sure exists (Cogito ergo sum), but on the other hand, results from neuroscience suggest it's basically an illusion and is not persistent.

Whether neuroscience can tell what consciousness is or isn't is still an open question

Seems non-disprovable to me, and hence out of the realm of any science

Not sure about non-disprovable, subject of consciousness has been keeping philosophers busy for a while. Consciousness maybe out of real of any science indefinitely or for the moment, depending on which theory you subscribe to.

What is the empirical reason to believe it's discrete rather than continuous?

For one, quantum physics describes the entire universe as discrete, if I understand it correctly

IANAP but as far as I understand, neither time nor space are believed to be discrete in the mainstream physics model.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_length

The Planck length describes the scale at which current known physical theories breakdown, not become discrete. Although some hypothesized extensions involve discretized time and space, there is no concrete evidence for this hypothesis.

Discrete space or time would cause some problems for the equivalence principle - that the laws of physics should look the same to all observers, irrespective of their relative velocities. It's hard to imagine how physics could look the same to all observers if spacetime is a discrete entity that can be contracted by different factors along different axes for different observers.

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