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> Otherwise, most of these questions become trivial when consciousness is considered as a physical, biological process bound to the brain.

If it were trivial, we'd be creating conscious entities via knowhow and will, not the old fashioned (fun) way.

We... need it be said... cannot. We can't even describe what consciousness is in a way it can be measured or analyzed. We can make things that do things, sure. We can even impart some of our own "consciousness" into these doer machines like robots. But we have no useful way of understanding the phenomena we feel and how that might differ from the robot, or a cat, or a bat, or whatever.

> Why is consciousness bound to a person's location? Because their brain is bound inside their skull.

We might as well ask: why is software in a robot the way it is? Because the software is on that CPU in that physical case over there. It's a non-answer and a diversion. Software can be transferred to other hardware, and there are many questions to be had whether software is consciousness, and also what the nature of that consciousness is given that there's clearly a layer of representation (1s and 0s) different than the material reality of the electrons pumping through silicon.

>If it were trivial, we'd be creating conscious entities via knowhow and will, not the old fashioned (fun) way.

I wasn't claiming the problem of consciousness as a whole was trivial, rather the specific questions being asked in the above comment become trivial when a biological origin of consciousness is assumed.

> But we have no useful way of understanding the phenomena we feel and how that might differ from the robot, or a cat, or a bat, or whatever.

This isn't entirely true. We've studied the brain and the relationship between the brain and consciousness for decades. We may not understand exactly how consciousness arises in the brain, or even why it exists, but there is absolutely a pile of evidence that consciousness is something the brain creates and that it doesn't exist apart from the brain.

>Software can be transferred to other hardware, and there are many questions to be had whether software is consciousness, and also what the nature of that consciousness is given that there's clearly a layer of representation (1s and 0s) different than the material reality of the electrons pumping through silicon.

If you want to be pedantic, software isn't ever transferred, only copied.

Also, while the "brain as computer" metaphor is tempting, I think it's also misleading. Decades of failure to produce a general AI demonstrate how alien one architecture is from another. Brains just don't operate enough like computers for comparisons of biological consciousness to software to be meaningful.

And that 'layer of representation' is an illusion. There are no 1s and 0s separate from the material reality of electrons and silicon, that's an entirely human abstraction that doesn't exist in the hardware, certainly not at the physical level where quantum effects become relevant and everything is just a charge that does or doesn't meet a tolerance.

> the specific questions being asked in the above comment become trivial when a biological origin of consciousness is assumed.

But unless there are complementary answers, they're trivial in the "useless" sense. They (1) don't provide any explanatory power, and (2) may very well be wrong--because as we've established--we have no clue.

It's of the same argumentative caliber as the anthropic principle: "Well, we're here because that's just the way we do things here in UniverseCorp."

I too could assume that consciousness is due to a particularly fascinating arrangement of angels dancing on physical atomic pins. I could say that every person is localized to a certain angel, or maybe a soul, and vociferously call it trivial because if you assume this thing then it naturally follows. But I don't want to assume that thing because that thing is totally useless at describing anything. Which is still where we are with consciousness, and the history of science is filled with whiplash and disappointment at finding older more primitive beliefs were more "true."

> There are no 1s and 0s separate from the material reality of electrons and silicon, that's an entirely human abstraction that doesn't exist in the hardware

There are 1s and 0s that are going across the world right now from you to me, and they're being transferred into electrons and photons and who knows what else afterwards. They may be emergent phenomena, but they exist, just like molecules exist as combinations of atoms: they have rules, those rules are exact and can be understood. Those rules are also not materially real, and yet they can be made immanent. We as tiny humans have built a real system where we have separated representation from reality, and we have not yet determined whether The Universe (TM) has made a comparable innovation.

For all the fancy words here, I don't find any substance. The evidence that consciousness is tied to the physical brain is overwhelming, and evidence that it exists outside the brain is nonexistent.

Well said. I think one of the problems is, that most just think that consciousness is a given and have a hard time to acknowledge, that we actually have no damn clue what it really is.

It's easy to say, that believing in a soul or something like it is hogwash, but just closing your eyes and telling yourself "I think and therefore I am" does not bring us any closer to an answer.

We have to assume that all unfalsifiable arguments could be true until we have proof, that they are incorrect. That is the only scientific approach.

I can completely follow your logic. And I completely agree that going supernatural or decending into a soul-debate is not constructive. That was not my intent.

Still, you and I can probably agree to some extent, that there is an inner eye inside of our heads looking outside. It also makes sense to me, that those processes could spawn from a feedback loop inside of a brain. Still. why did this inner eye spawn in this head we are in? There are 8 billion heads, why this one?

I'm not arguing for a soul or something. But I find it intruiging, that there had to be a mechanism which made your inner eye spawn at the place, where it now is. Only, what mechanism? Can it be explained physically? In my opinion it has to be, but maybe we missed it up to now

Your "mind's eye" is getting information from your actual eyes through your optic nerves and cortex. This is how we know it is a physical mechanism, we can affect it in predictable ways with lesions, drugs and other physical methods.

I think when you learn your brain creates symbols -- neural pathways corresponding to real world objects or concepts, with further pathways linking together related symbols. One of these symbols corresponds to the system itself, a self-reference. That's the "inner eye", and it wouldn't make sense for it to be in someone else's head because then it wouldn't be self-referential.

I have a lot of trouble with that exact question. It's no wonder the concept of a 'soul' is so pervasive over the ages - it explains things so neatly. It's like there is a cosmic Kubernetes cluster and at birth a process gets randomly assigned to a CPU.

Yeah, it's called evolution. You are one bet in a pool of bets for future survival. A single, uninterrupted, open-ended process that created all life on this planet. How many of our creations can lead to such diversity in one single run?

Once you decide whether you believe in free will, which is supernatural by any interesting definition, things fall into place:)

>Still. why did this inner eye spawn in this head we are in? There are 8 billion heads, why this one?

I get what you are saying, but honestly that question doesn't make sense. You are this one because that is how your brain developed.. just like you physically look how you are because of how your body developed. To say "why am I how I am" to me is no different than "why do I look this way?"

>Can it be explained physically?

Well.. if I smash you in the head with a hammer, your "consciousness" would most likely be affected because I damaged your brain, right? Seems pretty straightforward that we can indirectly say that yes it can be explained physically. We may not be able to explain the details.. but seems like we can say it's just simply what our brain evolved to do. Just like how our physical looks evolved for various reasons / chance.

The question is, why did the FPV-experiencing consciousness happen to bind to the body you are in? And why does it stick?

I guess it would be interesting to look at why it persists through sleep. And whether there were ever instances of people who wake up with different personalities. Also edge cases around coma/near-death restarts.

Or maybe things work like coroutines, and no matter which thread you get assigned to the state is all in the context. I mean it looks like that is 99.9% the case given what we know about memory formation, physical brain structures etc.

> The question is, why did the FPV-experiencing consciousness happen to bind to the body you are in? And why does it stick?

You're asking questions equivalent to "why does the interior of a box happen to bind to that particular piece of folded cardboard? And why is the same interior there when the box is closed and reopened?"

If each brain has a consciousness, and each is uniquely generated by that brain, the 'binding' and 'sticking' questions go away.

That line of explanation doesn't do it for me, because there is only one brain that has my FPV consciousness. Why this particular one? I think it's a question related to the topics of breaking symmetry, or nondeterminism. It's also a great unsolved question that many smarter people than me couldn't answer so I'm not hopeful I'll live to see it answered. But I will continue to wonder at it now and then, like when articles like this pop up. :-)

> there is only one brain that has my FPV consciousness. Why this particular one?

to me, the answer is because you were born with that one.

Maybe it's better to think about how your FPV consciousness didn't exist prior to your birth. It came into being when you came into being. I don't think there's a separation between your FPV consciousness and physical brain. If your metabolism stops your FPV consciousness stops

> Maybe it's better to think about how your FPV consciousness didn't exist prior to your birth

That is unknowable though. You may just not remember it. Is memory what makes consciousness?

People can lose the ability to form new memories without losing consciousness, but arguably without any memory at all you won't have any continuity of experience, which seems essential.

>That line of explanation doesn't do it for me

I don't mean to be rude, but you are flat out wrong here.. you are not accepting the "simplicity" of what is actually happening- you want to make it something complicated and metaphysical, which is why the explanation doesn't do it for you.

>me, because there is only one brain that has my FPV consciousness. Why this particular one?

Well.. why do you look the way you do? Why doesn't everyone look exactly the same? Because there are tiny bits of random evolution/changes in our biological bodies. The same is happening in the brain- no one has exactly the same functioning brain. You have your FPV consciousness because that's the one you have.

If you are looking for some other answer.. then it's just philosophical nonsense at some point. It's like saying "Why does Uranus look the way it does, while Neptune looks different?". It's just what happened.. if Uranus and Neptune switched how they looked to us from the beginning, you would never know and be asking the same question that doesn't make sense.

Likewise no offense but I don't think you are getting my point. That's fine.

Look, the bottom line is we need to understand how the phenomenon works so we can replicate it and harness it. My thinking may or may not be wrong, but what's certain is that it's not testable. Can't wait for an explanation that is :-)

I think you aren't understanding the answers we're giving you. There is no difference between asking "why does my brain have my consciousness" and asking "why does my head have my face". It is exactly the same question.

The problem with your "non metaphysical definition of consciousness", is that it does not define what consciousness is. It actually pretends it does not exist.

Sure enough, we know consciousness is tied mainly to the body (and the brain in particular, but not only). It starts and ends with it, it changes with every small change of it. They are just one "thing", two sides of the same coin, it seems.

The problem is, and it's very not a trivial one, that we can know the physical world and our body that is part of it, but for all we know about that physical world, consciousness is not required. It's like it's added on top for no good reason. We can feel the world and make sense of it, up to a point where we have a good understanding of how the whole observable universe kind of works, but we couldn't do better, if we had to describe consciousness to a distant relative from another universe, than to say "so around here we have matter and space and time, and they act like this and that, according to those equations, and when this kind of particule enter the vincinity of that one then this happens, etc, oh and by the way, every time you have a piece of matter organized in such a way that it can somehow represents itself and its environment, then this thing feels that it exists independently, and I'm afraid I can't explain what feeling feels like, you have to be conscious to understand, sorry".

You could say that we know how physics works but not why, and similarly we know how consciousness works but not why. But that would be inaccurate, because what we know about the "how" of consciousness is actually the "how" of behavior. We know nothing about the "how" of conscious experience; for instance we know how pain works at the level of individual neurons and how it leads to some macroscopic behavior, but we have no clue how this relates to (not using "cause" because it's certainly not causal) an experience of pain, and what the subject of that experience is, or if there is only one or many such subjects, or how independent these subjects are from each others, etc...

> Is it possible to transfer consciousness from one entity to another? transfer, no, because consciousness is inextricably linked to the brain.

What if we can transplant the brain itself? The consciousness is still contained in and created by the same brain, but every other part of the experience (sensory input) are from another body effectively transferring consciousness between bodies.

It takes surprisingly little effort to trick your consciousness. VR isn't even that good yet in terms of resolution and it's quite convincing. If you were put in a VR headset as a child and given a dogs body or something it's doubtful you could tell the difference.

A similar feeling is present when flying FPV drones. A good pilot typically feels like they are the drone. Your mind immediately separates the drone from the rest of the environment because it responds to your control input and matches visual perception.

You're right and we don't even need VR for it, its easy to get engrossed in a videogame and project yourself into the game.

Completely strange people downvote this comment. It is completely logical, and if you disagree with any of this- it is up to you to prove otherwise.

Obviously it does make people uncomfortable talking like this.. I don't understand why, I guess they are scared of the simple truth that we are simply the most evolved animals on our planet- but still animals. There is nothing special about our brain (compared to other species), it's just a bit more advanced. And we have physical features that have basically allowed us to take advantage of our brain power and continue to grow.

We are animals. So anyone who wants to talk about consciousness being on something like a 'soul' or whatever better be just as prepared to talk about how my cat also has a soul.. and dolphins have a soul.. and why is this dolphin's consciousness in dolphin A instead of dolphin B.

I think the truth is a lot less interesting than people want to believe..

> it is up to you to prove otherwise

This is funny because the reason why I cannot prove you that I am conscious _in_ _addition_ _to_ being a body governed by the rules of physics, is the same reason why I believe consciousness is metaphysical.

Qed :)

> Completely strange people downvote this comment. It is completely logical, and if you disagree with any of this- it is up to you to prove otherwise.

Technically, the burden of proof lies with the one making an assertion.

> Obviously it does make people uncomfortable talking like this

And people talking like this often get uncomfortable if someone doesn't accept their opinions as fact. People are weird in the most wonderful ways!

> I think the truth is a lot less interesting than people want to believe.

And also a lot more difficult to find than it seems, the nature of consciousness being what it is.

> Otherwise, most of these questions become trivial when consciousness is considered as a physical, biological process bound to the brain.

They're also fairly trivial if you imagine God created and controls everything and that's just the way it is.

> What happens when you die or someone is born? Nothing. No afterlife, to karma, no reincarnation, no bardo, nothing.

It's certainly plausible. But is it true?

> And finally, are those questions even answerable?

> Yes, I believe they are, but many people are uncomfortable with the ramifications of the answer as best supported by available evidence - we are purely physical beings existing within a purely physical universe. Despite all of the evidence from biology, neurology, chemistry, physics, etc. failing to show any credible evidence of a supernatural or non-biological component of consciousness apart from the brain, many people keep hoping someone will discover the soul someday and be free of the prison of material reality.

Similarly, many people are uncomfortable with acknowledging that what is actually true about these matters. There seem to be certain ideas that make all people fundamentally nervous, and the question of consciousness seems to be one of the most powerful ones.

> This is only fascinating if you refuse to accept a non supernatural or non metaphysical definition of consciousness.

That's a failure to appreciate the beauty, complexity and wonders of our brains, bodies and environment. No effort on appreciating, but still wanting to feel special. Thus, consciousness simply has to have a supernatural element. It wouldn't be fun otherwise.

It's pretty straightforward to follow when consciousness ends, with death. In my mind, a harder question is when does it begin? After one cell, two cells, a trillion cells? If a scientist can pin down the moment it starts then that may lead to more progress on the other questions.

That is not really a big problem if you take consciousness as some sort of a continuous measure. For simplicity I usually use skill at playing any chosen real-time game.

The universe is incredibly intelligible and follows invisible laws. That, per definition, is a supernatural observation since we can’t touch the invisible laws.

>That, per definition, is a supernatural observation since we can’t touch the invisible laws.

The definition of supernatural is that which exists outside of the order of nature, not that which is only explicitly tangible. Natural laws are human-created abstractions which explain the observed behaviors of the natural world, which by definition makes them natural, not supernatural.

“ The definition of supernatural is that which exists outside of the order of nature.”

Natural laws exist without humans, unless one believes the universe disappears without the human to collapse the wave function.

Nature follows these laws, so the laws are abstractly outside of nature.

Again, your definitions of "natural" and "supernatural" are not ones that anyone else uses.

Natural laws are observed within nature, which makes them a part of nature. To claim that natural laws are supernatural simply because they're abstractions, and that consciousness is therefore supernatural regardless of its nature, is absurd. It's a rhetorical cheat, not an argument.

That’s fair, although I’m not sure we can observe consciousness, we can only experience it, we have no measure…