Where is the rational thought behind this consciousness discussion? If all of you "critical thinkers" are really responding with "You just don't want to accept that consciousness can't be explained with science" then I have lost my last remaining bit of hope in humanity's intelligence.
Of course, in future we might understand things like consciousness and qualia, and it's likely that people who do it will be scientists. It won't be "science" though as we understand it today, it will necessarily have to be something bigger. Let's call it "science+".
And, of course, just because science can't explain consciousness doesn't mean that religion can. It can certainly claim to be able to do it, but will be as convincing as the religion is at explaining everything else.
If it cannot be so defined, then it cannot be explained within an empirical framework, or "science" if you insist, by definition. Empiricism requires objective measurement. The kind of consciousness people are talking about, the experience of being, cannot be objectively measured because it is a purely subjective concept.
If you want to talk purely about ideas that exist within an empirical framework, then you're talking about things like minds and brains, complexity of interactions, etc. All objectively measurable and perfectly scientific things.
But that isn't what people are talking about, because it isn't interesting. Because when you get right down to it what people really want to know is how badly we're allowed to treat things. If it isn't "conscious", then we need not concern ourselves over its apparent suffering need we?
I do think that "consciousness likely can't be explained by science" if you take science to mean the scientific method and models produced by it, and not just "rational thought" which I would argue is not the same thing.
Science at its core is a series of predictive models and they don't tell you how things "are" (whatever that means), but rather how things behave within some error bound. On the one hand I can see how it's dangerous to cast any sort of criticism in scientific results and theorems especially when they've been well established, but that doesn't mean they are "facts" or universal, only that they've withstood repeated criticism quite well.
The problem that this article is talking about is that you can't observe experience (consciousness) like you can observe "physical" phenomena, so you can't use the same sort of tools like you would use for conducting other sorts of science.
You obviously approach any intelligent discussion in consciousness with rational thought, and the people you can take seriously in this field do just that.
If you're interested in reading more about this I can point you to resources, which should probably start with Chalmer's "Hard problem of consciousness".
(You should have realized that HN has been infiltrated a long time ago)
Not precisely consciousness, but scientifically way better, than this BS article and many comments supporting it, because it is:
- measurable
- gives verifiable predictions, that actually hold true
- actually has some relation to real world which is also a multiplayer game of sorts
- shows you can reproduce the phenomenon in other forms (classical state enumerating programs, neural nets)
I too am disappointed in the low comment quality here
Geez, one spelling mistake ruined your day? I hope the rest of your week treats you better.
I think people delude themselves that science, at least as currently practised, is always objective.