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Comment by Sophistifunk | Hacker News Reader

The problem with all these arguments is that if consciousness is not an inherent side effect of computation, then it must have evolved, which means it have once given a very simple animal a competitive advantage.

But we have no theory, evidence, or even well-thought-out stoner postulations of consciousness having any effect on the material universe, other than fancies of wish fulfilment. It appears to be a one-way process, information travels from meatspace to consciousness, never the other way around.

From here, logically I can't get to any place other than consciousness being a side-effect or emergent property of computation in general. There's no reason for it to have evolved.

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The act of saying “consciousness doesn’t have any effect on the material universe” denies the premise of what’s being said. Behold, your consciousness has just had direct effect on material universe (just as deciding to obtain the device on which it was typed, and before that someone’s idea to make that device, had).

I remember myself being unshakeably of the same opinion: consciousness is obviously something of no relation to reality, so it might as well not exist or be an illusion. It’s one of those things that are tricky to explain but can just dawn on you, how it’s inevitably the thought that manipulates reality.

That depends on your perspective. I could argue that the consciousness merely attributes these actions to itself. The consciousness could be a passive observer, tricking itself into believing it is the cause behind the actions of the meat computer it observeres.

Then again, that argument doesn't sit well with the evolution argument. If we assume consciousness is a fitness advantage, then it must have some effect on the organism's behaviour.

Yes, a consciousness solely for the purposes of post-rationalisation seems quite redundant and to me raises more questions that it solves.

I don’t subscribe to physicalism since it strikes me as clumsy and inelegant. A consciousness arguing for physicalism is denying the existence of the only thing it has direct access to and granting objective reality to something it may have well conjured up.

That's not consciousness. Consciousness is the space in which your brain tells a story pretending that "you" are in charge a lot more often than you are.

Ah, but it also is that place that tells you that external world exists. You prefer to trust it in one but not the other, don’t you?

A counterargument might be that consciousness is an inherent side effect of all the stuff that goes on in the brain. And while yes, the brain does some computation, that is by no means a complete description of all the brain does and is. So computation of any sort will not necessarily produce the side effect if you just do enough of it. Rather it's a side effect of the way the brain works, which is not the way a barrel full of pocket calculators, or a Macbook, or a bunch of rocks in the sand works.

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