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Comment by spanhandler | Hacker News Reader

I dunno, I’m actually about halfway to being convinced that if we can figure out what causes breakfast we’ll necessarily have solved the problem of consciousness, too.

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The point is breakfast is what we define it to be. It is a set of objects that have certain properties that we deem to be described as breakfast. In the same way consciousness is what we decide it to be. There is no natural definition, its a thing we made up. This also implies that searching for the natural explanation of consciousness is about as useful as searching for the natural definition of breakfast.

I disagree, but thats what the article is saying.

The article is saying that there is an experience/phenomenon of "the breakfast" that cannot be explained by an analysis of its constituents. The whole (the breakfast) is more/something else than the sum of its parts. Contemporary scientists only look at the parts because that's what their methods allow them to do/reason about. They miss the essence of the breakfast. Their methods don't even allow them to acknowledge that breakfasts exist -- however & whatever that would mean and imply.

Since I think the current scientific treatment of consciousness is rather deplorable (unconscious scientists unconsciously trying to be consciously smart), I like this article.

Interestingly an appreciation of what is meant by "qualia" seems to be correlated with age. I would wager that it is also inversely correlated with scientific qualifications. Imho there is a kind of person that while hugely clever is not necessarily very conscious and curricula (also imho) select for those kinds of people. So when you say "unconscious scientists unconsciously trying to be consciously smart" I take it literally. I think scientists can only make such claims as "consciousness does not exist" because they are not particularly conscious themselves. Or at least their awareness is, in the flow, as it were, with no meta - no awareness of awareness and hence no consciousness as I think the term is best described.

Oh and I like your interpretation of the article better. Although I'm not convinced I give the author that much credit.

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