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Comment by morpheos137 | Hacker News Reader

I don't believe consciousness exists in a meaningful way in the real world. It certainly exists as a word in a dictionary and as something for philosophical types to have woo debates over. I think the word is vague term that signifies different somewhat independent things that living organisms have to a greater or lesser extent (memory, emotion, thought, embodiment, etc). I believe attempting to have a scientific debate about consciousness is kind of like asking how many angels could dance on the head of pin.

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Of course you're conscious. It's simply a label attached to the phenomena going on in your head. Denying you are conscious is about as substantive as people with certain psychiatric disorders saying they aren't real.

>If we can think of something that is not objectively measurable what suggests that it exists objectively as opposed to it being a subjective opinion?

That you prefer chocolate ice cream isn't objective. But that you have a preference for chocolate ice cream is objective. The content of the conscious percept isn't necessarily real, but the fact that you are having what we call a 'conscious percept' certainly is real. Just because it is happening in your head, why should it not be real?

I find that a very strange statement for a supposedly conscious being to make. Consciousness does absolutely objectively exist, or at least I can say it does for me. That its existence is not objectively measurable doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it just means that the philosophy of empiricism is not complete.

>I find that a very strange statement for a supposedly conscious being to make.

I don't claim to be conscious. I am alive and awake and thinking and sensing, etc.

>Consciousness does absolutely objectively exist, or at least I can say it does for me.

This sentence appears to confuse subjective experience with objective reality.

>That its existence is not objectively measurable doesn't mean it doesn't exist

If we can think of something that is not objectively measurable what suggests that it exists objectively as opposed to it being a subjective opinion?

Can you define consciousness without invoking subjective conscious experience? You agree there is not evidence of objective existence and yet you say it objectively exists because you subjectively feel it does. Is this not self-contradictory?

OK, Consciousness is a subjective opinion.

Are you claiming that subjective opinions do not exist, despite your own observations of your own subjective opinons?

Also, imagine you live in a box with a yellow ball. And you can speak to other people outside your box. They tell you they also live in a box with a yellow ball. You will never have proof that they actually have yellow balls in their boxes. And they will never have proof that you actually have a yellow ball in your box.

Would you say that yellow balls are merely a subjective opinion, and don't exist?

First you have to define what you mean by "exist." Of course every idea that can be conceived exists in some sense.

That does not mean its existence is realised or useful. Is it useful (consequential) and consistent that yellow balls exist? If yes, then they do. If no, then they don't.

Is there any measurement or objective fact in the world that you can become aware of except by means of subjective experience?

> Can you define consciousness without invoking subjective conscious experience? You agree there is not evidence of objective existence and yet you say it objectively exists because you subjectively feel it does. Is this not self-contradictory?

No, I'm saying it need not be objectively measurable to be real. This is what I mean by empiricism being an incomplete philosophy.

Hold your hand to a flame and tell me there is no experience that goes beyond the material world. It feels like something to experience pain. Why? That is the question here. To deny that there is such an experience is self deceiving.

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