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Comment by underbluewaters | Hacker News Reader

I do a lot of spearfishing. It's very obvious when hunting that creatures like fish are a lot more intelligent than one would expect without those experiences. Until you are in their environment trying to carry out similar tasks their behaviors are just not legible to our understanding.

I struggle with whether to call the behavior I see consciousness since I can't really come up with a good definition. The best I can think of makes a lot of assumptions about how much of our own behavior we actually control and perceive... which isn't exactly an objective truth.

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> I struggle with whether to call the behavior I see consciousness since I can't really come up with a good definition.

Don’t feel too bad about it, Dennett argues that consciousness doesn’t even exist and I’m not sure he’s wrong.

Somewhere in his writings he calls it a "user illusion". I _think_ what he means is that nature selects for the creatures that attach a lot of "weight" to their sensory inputs. In other words, if we perceived our thought processes as they really are (as a purely material computation by our brains), our evolutionary fitness would be lower.

I personally am with Noam Chomsky on this one: I think it is absurd to conclude that consciousness is an illusion, it is one of two phenomena in the universe that every human being can prove to themselves exists through experimentation, in part ocular using Descartes' evil demon thought experiment. We can all directly observe that it exists.

Proving that "consciousness" exists by introspection strikes me as being a bit like proving phlogiston exists by burning something. No one questions our surface experience, but is "consciousness" (whatever that means) a good framework for understanding that, or even a coherent concept?

Practitioners of meditation often describe a process of silencing a chorus of inner voices, one by one, and being faced with an existential crisis upon realizing that there is no singular "self" or "I" - a concept that "consciousness" implicitly relies on, because if there is no "I" then what is the thing that is conscious? So the idea that consciousness is an illusory phenomenon is also something you can directly experience.

(By the way - what's the other phenomenon?)

Free will.

It isn't simple introspection. It is a rigorous scientific experiment, Descartes' evil demon thought experiment.

Additionally, you can only prove your own consciousness exists, not consciousness in general. But that's OK, classic materialism will suffice to determine that the world probably isn't an illusion and other beings like you probably experience similar phenomena.

Meditation is not a rigorous experiment, if someone can formulate a reproducible experiment like Descartes' thought experiments that produces this phenomenon then there's something. Further, there's no requirement that a voice be a singular one for the self or consciousness to exist. We can deduce that they exist, how they work or what exactly they are is not known.

Consciousness is all of your inner experience. It's not about control or perception, that is it's not about what you can control and how you perceive things but that you can control and perceive things.

I don't think there is any reason to doubt that fish and insects for that matter are conscious in that sense.

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