Understanding consciousness is more important than ever | Hacker News Reader

Understanding consciousness is more important than ever

saigaddam.medium.com

2 pointsChaitanyaSai7 comments

Consciousness is a fun topic and we still have a lot to discover about it. I'm surprised by the things scientists say about it that to me are so obviously wrong. I'll check out your book and add it to my collection.

Thanks! "Theories of consciousness" by Seth and Bayne [1], is a great recent summary of popular theories. But sadly, like every major summary, it omits Grossberg's work entirely. The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul by Ginsburg and Jablonka [2] is a long but fantastic read. I've commented about it in the past here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31917832

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35505255/ [2] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262351102/the-evolution-of-the-...

Author did not even try to understand what a conscious is. Article seems like lots of somebody's ideas picked without any kind of backbone or maybe references.

Author here. I reference them in the article, but if you are looking for the original sources, here they are:

Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain by Stephen Grossberg https://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Mind-Resonant-Brain-Makes/d...

And our own book Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos https://www.amazon.com/Journey-Mind-Thinking-Emerged-Chaos/d...

And it has a ton of references. We didn't just make this stuff up you know! :)

predictive hallucination redux

Definitely has elements of predictive hallucination! The more fundamental questions are why, how and --the key aspect that is always ignored -- who is perceiving this predictive hallucination. Satisfactory answers to these questions require a mechanistically precise model. And that's the big achievement of the work I talk about here.

I pretty much agree with Metzinger's take in "The Ego Tunnel." I side with the "self is an illusion" crowd. Conscious experience is a tool for the body to solve some problem. I see this when I get better at any task. Either I don't perceive the task at all or it feels completely different over time. Driving starts out as a full attention task which feels a particular way. Now after 20 years it feels like walking.

So when you talk about needing to know "who" is experiencing, I don't really follow the thread. "I" don't exist. And the experience I'm having is wholly constructed in my mind, with no direct access to reality, only a holodeck. There is no me having an experience (2 objects interacting). There is only the constructed experience which has the side effect of "controlling the body." (a process happening now)

I think the hard problem is empty. I'm satisfied physical theories.

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