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Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

Consciousness has no qualities so it can't be studied scientifically. Chalmers is doing the next best thing: investigating precisely what "gray-matter activity" engenders a noticeable change in qualia.

I want to point out that it is possible for two conscious systems to merge and share consciousness. It is a very intimate process, so you don't hear a lot about it, even at places like Science of Consciousness conference, but it's one way to approach the study of consciousness.

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Consciousness must arise out of something, and that something ought to have qualities than can be studied.

The idea that consciousness must arise out of "something" also needs to be demonstrated, even though it looks obvious on the surface. The best analogy I can give is a dream. If you see a red flower in the dream, you will assume that the experience of redness is caused by something in the dream, whereas its real cause lies beyond any "somethings" in the dream. It is possible to know this by waking up from the dream.

I could try and convince you that it's possible to know the same thing about this particular dream, but without being able to offer you evidence it might not be very useful.

Ok, but if you keep digging, eventually you are going to stumble into the concept of the dream itself, and then the question then becomes what properties and qualities of the process of dreaming gave birth to a red flower in the mind.

I will concede that how consciousness really arises may look nothing like what we can imagine or picture today, but we have yet to come across something that is both real and escapes scientific observation, and I don't think we should approach consciousness as such.

The idea here would be that consciousness isn't a "thing" at all, and so doesn't abide by the same constraints as things. Instead, consciousness is the very luminosity that arises as the experience called "seeing a red flower" (as well as all sights, sounds, thoughts, etc. that constitute your experience of the world). Space, matter, energy, etc. are then mental categories convenient for describing the shape and behavior of consciousness.

The two questions are then (1) what is the cause of this luminosity itself, and (2) why is it taking this particular form (red flower).

The mystical claim is that it is possible to know firsthand that time, space, etc. are illusions constrained to this dream, and that the luminosity itself is beyond them (and therefore not meaningfully "caused"). And the answer to why the dream is taking this particular shape can be known because "you" are, ultimately, the luminosity itself (aka "God").

Proving this to others is a different matter. In fact, in general the problem of intersubjectivity (to avoid the whole thing collapsing into solipsism) is the hardest aspect to communicate.

For those who are interested, I add that the idea that monktastic1 shares is present in different mystical traditions. I find it at least curious. I copy some quotes I once found in the web about this.

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He is the Eternal among things that pass away, pure Consciousness of conscious beings. —Upanishads (Hindu)

All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, besides which nothing exists. —Huang Po (Buddhist)

The light by which the soul is illumined, in order that it may see and truly understand everything...is God himself. —St. Augustine (Christian)

He is the spirit of the cosmos, its hearing, its sight, and its hand. Through Him the cosmos hears, through Him it sees, through Him it speaks, through Him it grasps, through Him it runs. —Ibn 'Arabi (Muslim)

Mind comes from this sublime and completely unified source above; it is divided only as it enters into the universe of distinctions. —Menahem Nahum (Jewish)

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The quotes are from https://www.centerforsacredsciences.org/index.php/Articles/t...

I've come to believe that that isn't the case, but that's a position which isn't scientific. In any event, it's a reasonable theory on which to proceed with a scientific investigation of consciousness.

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Time is subordinate to consciousness, in the sense that "now" is a synonym for "you".

This is a really subtle point, and not easy to convey. I've deleted a half a dozen elaborations before posting this.

Whenever we are conscious it's always now. (You were conscious five minutes ago, but the only reason you know that is because you are aware of memories of it now.) It's never not now, or if it is you're not there.

Since it's never now without you, and you're never there except now, there's nothing to distinguish between "now" and "you". It is literally impossible to separate "you" and "now".

I think this must have some sort of physical (as in Physics) meaning or significance.

Hi there. I once read a post by you[1] that I vibed with. It reminded me of an interesting forum post that you might like, and I wanted to share[2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13026758 [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20141010211838/http://forums.phil...

Ohai! I recall your username from somewhere as well. Cheers!

That discussion was interesting, it even included the observation, quite correct, that [the concept of] consciousness is useless.

> If the concept is so vague as to be completely devoid of utility, then it is hard to understand how discourse about it amounts to anything more than a form of poetic or mystical expression.

That's the unnerving thing about it: it's useless yet the most significant "thing" in the world...

I have deliberately adopted the habit of mentioning the possibility of merging consciousness when the subject comes up, because it's one way of breaking the stalemate around the Hard Problem.

You can't make a consciousness-o-meter but you can know the consciousness of some "other" person. Whether that counts as empirical is beyond me. :-)

Or maybe consciousness exists a priori and things arise out of it.

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