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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

It seems to go even deeper. Not even that "I" am having a subjective experience is undeniable, but only that there is a subjective experience at all. When deconstructing sensory and thought phenomena, it can be found that any particular trait that points to "I" is actually ephemeral, and not a permanent fixture of the experiencer. For instance, the sense that there is a face and eyes that is being looked out through or a personality that has a history and persists through time disappear when in a state of flow or when dreaming. They are just concepts, and all concepts are built on wet sand.

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Bertrand Russell made this point about Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum”, stating it would more correctly be something like “there are thoughts”.

But in this case Russell was completely wrong because he interprets Descartes' cogito as a syllogism whereas it is a performative statement. Descrates' is only establishing that it's self-evident for himself that he exists, and not to assert to anyone external that he or his thoughts exist.

He’s making the point that he-ness and himself-ness is too bold a conclusion to draw from the mere existence of thoughts.

Thinking these thoughts however (from a pov of some subject) is not a "mere existence of thoughts". This imo is a classic analytic/positivistic language game.

Prove it!

(I jest, you're preaching to the choir, i.e. a first year philosophy degree drop-out who switched to do computer science to avoid having these arguments)

Which doesn't solve the problem, because it define what a "thought" is.

And besides - there are also emotions and physical sensations.

We can just lump all these together as “qualia”. “There are qualia” is the basest possible conclusion that can be drawn, as opposed to “I have qualia, therefore I am”.

Yeah I take it to mean this way too, its very strange that Descartes is controversial among eg panpsychics because of the fixation on the term 'think' - it seems pretty clear that he was just noticing that qualia exists and is the only real axiom one can rely on for any kind of self-induced philosophy of mind.

Sorry but you always forgot that when you sleep your consciousness disappeared. Please take account for this fact. When all sensory shut down, really you feel nothing and of cos think nothing.

No it doesn't.

When you actually pass out, there's a very real sense of discontinuity. You find yourself on the floor, unsure how long you've been there (even if it was just seconds), and how exactly you got to that position (the previous recorded memory being you standing there and feeling woozy).

It's very different from just sleeping, where you still retain a feeling of continuity with both place and time.

Consciousness can end temporarily, perhaps permanently. This in no way suggests that it’s an illusion.

The claim that consciousness is an illusion has always seemed like nonsense to me; for, if consciousness is an illusion, who experiences that illusion? Answer: the conscious mind.

Consciousness is a trick for human neural network to simplify some calculations about the world. It was developed as an evolutionary trait and proved useful to survive. That's my opinion. It's not an illusion, it definitely exists as an particular configuration of neurons.

Why put the cart before the horse

> Answer: the conscious mind.

It's a controversial idea, but depending on the state of the brain, there may be more than one consciousness.

Maybe "you" are actually a committee.

I like the opposite idea, that maybe we are all the same consciousness, projected in bodies that have different subjective experiences and memories.

My consciousness doesn't seem to disappear when I fall asleep, only my awareness of my bodies sensations. I often go to sleep reading, and the thoughts I'm having about the book I'm reading will continue for quite some time, even after my eyes close. I know this because I often startle myself awake by dropping my book. I also have similar experiences as I wake up, my consciousness slowly starts to incorporate my sensations of reality with the thought process that is continuously going in my head.

Waking consciousness disappears.

But sleeping people are not even close to being unconscious.

They can dream, and they're aware enough to know they should probably wake up if they're prodded hard enough.

Conveniently this metaphor works at multiple levels.

Not even medically unconscious people are guaranteed to be completely non-sentient. Ask any anaesthetist.

I think memory shuts down when you sleep. So that it still feels like something to be sleeping, only we cannot recall it when we awake, because it is not persisted in memory. This is the same reason we cannot remember what it is like to be a rock, even though it does feel like something to be a rock.

Until you start dreaming.

It's when you're anaesthesized for surgery that your consciousness goes away.

No dreams, nothing. You don't exist during those hours. You cannot account for them later; they are deleted.

When I woke up after surgery I felt that 1.5 hours had passed. But in actuality it was something around 4 hours since I went under. It turned out that 1.5 hours before I woke up I had been brought out of anesthesia and after that I simply slept. I didn't have any dreams at all, but at least my internal clock had started working. A clock presumably doesn't need consciousness, but there's definitely a qualitative difference between anesthesia and sleep. And as I sometimes suddenly wake up with a solution to some problem, with no recallable dream preceding it, my personal subjective opinion is that there's some level of consciousness going on even in sleep. That anesthesia experience was so very different from anything I had experienced before, with no recall whatsoever of the time that had passed.

How do you estimate time elapsed without external inputs? Experiments where people cut themselves from external stimuli seem to show that on the contrary, we don’t good internal clocks on this regard.

I nearly always "know" how long I have been asleep, unless there's been excessive drinking involved (and that would be long ago). "Normal" drinking doesn't seem to affect this. And for shorter naps (less than two hours) it's pretty accurate.

People probably do this based on experience. You know from the wall clock time that you slept, say 7 hours. So on a daily basis, you know what 7 hours of sleep feels like and from that you can extrapolate: if you think you slept about half as much, maybe it was 3 hours. Kind of thing.

Or that we just don't remember the dream states. Have you ever woken up and the dream rapidly fades away?

When I had surgery, I had very lucid dreams. And they were actually quite arousing. Afterwards I heard that it was actually common.

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