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Comment by zubspace | Hacker News Reader

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

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>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.

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:)

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.

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