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Comment by automoton1 | Hacker News Reader

I don't see how talking about consciousness is necessarily a limitation to it being a by-product of physical processes.

It could be that consciousness is simply an emergent property (a by-product) of the communication of billions of neurons that are connected in trillions of ways. Where neurons are emergent of chemical phenomena which are emergent of atomic phenomena and so on.

I'm probably greatly simplifying the dependencies of phenomena, but I think that consciousness is most definitely based upon physical processes. The current evidence makes me believe that consciousness is a by-product of evolution, which is a by-product of the conditions on our planet.

So it goes.

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"Our thoughts have no real impact on the underlying operation of brain" cannot be literally true, if you are able to talk about your thoughts. Because talking about your thoughts means that somehow your thoughts influenced at least the part of your brain that guides your mouth.

Also, how would the ability to think evolve in our species, if our thoughts never had an impact on our behavior? Then they could not provide any evolutionary advantage.

It is possible (and quite likely) that some weaker version of that statement is true; e.g. that there are many things that brain does independently on our thoughts. But claiming that there is "no" impact is just trying to be edgy. Yes, such absolute statement sounds more interesting, but it is wrong.

I do agree, but to be fair, Epiphenomenalism makes a slightly stronger point. Not only is consciousness entirely a physical process, but the 'events' of consciousness (any thought, feeling, emotion, sensation you've ever experienced) has absolutely no impact on behavior. There is no feedback loop here. So, instead of

Touch hot flame -> Feel sensation of pain -> Move hand

It's...

Touch hot flame -> brain processes event and sends signals to move hand -> You experience all of this but it had no relevancy to the chain of events.

EDIT: This does beg the question 'why do we have consciousness, then?' or slightly related 'how could we talk about it?'. Which are interesting questions, and probably explained by darwinian processes, but don't really get at the heart of it. My thoughts anyhow.

> but the 'events' of consciousness (any thought, feeling, emotion, sensation you've ever experienced) has absolutely no impact on behavior. > or slightly related 'how could we talk about it?'

All of this is at least intuitively easy to explain with added language and complexity in the brain. So like the chain would become:

Touch hot flame -> brain processes event (and then does complicated language processing, and complicated memory and emotion processing) and THEN sends signals to move hand or not move hand -> You experience all of this but it had no relevancy to the chain of events.

Where I would ponder the relevancy of consciousness is when it comes to attention and remembering things. Just from personal experience, I can read a book, watch a movie or listen to music and I will not remember a thing if I wasn't aware of it. Is awareness and consciousness the same thing? I don't know, but at least we are conscious of everything we are aware of, by definition, and not necessarily vice versa.

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