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Comment by telmo | Hacker News Reader

> There are monks that would say that with some practice, you would realize it's not. And they call that direct experience too.

I am aware, and I do happen to maintain a practice of that nature. My question to these monks: who is this "you" that realizes it is not? (I don't fear so much offending the monks, my understanding is that many actually enjoy this sort of question :)

> Something you can't measure objectively cannot be so easily hand waved.

Everything that I can measure objectively, including the act of measuring and the concepts of "measure" and "objectivity" happen within the theater of my consciousness (the only thing I have direct experience of is my consciousness, everything else is relative to it).

So I say: Something you experience directly cannot be so easily hand waved.

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> Everything that I can measure objectively, including the act of measuring and the concepts of "measure" and "objectivity" happen within the theater of my consciousness

Correction: they happen in what you believe to be a theatre of consciousness. Belief without evidence is religion.

You can demonstrate that such a theatre might exist by demonstrating some phenomenon which cannot be accounted for via mechanistic processes. All attempts have failed so far, as the intuition pumps are typically fallacious.

> Correction: they happen in what you believe to be a theatre of consciousness. Belief without evidence is religion.

I have the highest possible level of evidence: direct experience. It just happens to not be communicable. Not everything is.

> You can demonstrate that such a theatre might exist by demonstrating some phenomenon which cannot be accounted for via mechanistic processes.

All the mechanistic processes that you can account for where observed within the theater of your consciousness. So was everything you ever learned about science, and also this present discussion with me.

What I am pointing at is just Plato's Cave. Not a new argument, nor a settled one.

> I have the highest possible level of evidence: direct experience.

That's not evidence, that's a perception. Perceptions must be interpreted within a body of knowledge. Direct perception is never direct evidence because perceptions are necessarily flawed.

>Something you experience directly cannot be so easily hand waved.

How does this become reconciled with the fact that I cannot directly experience your subjective experience? Does that imply I should be able to hand-wave your subjective away as if it doesn't exist?

I think what part of the discussion is getting at is that a definition of consciousness would (at least partly) solve this problem.

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