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Comment by s_m_t | Hacker News Reader

Seemed to left have out the simplest explanation. Consciousness doesn't exist. Unrelated but it is a bit strange to me that a lot of (most? nearly all?) atheists believe in consciousness.

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I feel like this position is meaningless. People experience something they call "consciousness". The phenomenon exists. Saying that it doesn't exist seems to really mean "the phenomenon is an illusion created by something else". But we don't understand how that works either, and this explanation is just as untestable as any other.

That explanation is too simple for those who think/feel subjective states exist, however. While someone may be fooled about what they're perceiving, they can't be fooled about that they're perceiving, from a first person view. It's much harder to know if someone else is perceiving or just behaving like they are.

But there seems to be something of a fundamental divide between those who find consciousness obvious and those who don't. ISTR Chalmers, after on a boat trip with one of the eliminative materialists (might have been Dennett or Dawkins) said that all the experiences he had had while on the trip just confirmed that he was conscious and thus the existence of consciousness, and the eliminative materialist said he still had no idea what Chalmers was on about.

Dennett, in his gloriously titled book Consciousness Explained seems to suggest we're merely tricked by our perceptual apparatus into believing we have conscious experience, similarly to how a succession of still frames, 24 per second, fools movie audiences into believing they see moving pictures (I may be a little unfair, but that's more or less what I took away from my reading) which makes me wonder if Dennett actually is (or is indulging in literary cosplaying as) a philosophical zombie.[1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

That's like saying movies technically don't exist because they're just a series of still frames. That sequence of still frames is a real thing in its own right, and it has a name.

The movie is more analogous to the conscious person, or perhaps “the mind,” and no one is proposing that those things don’t exist.

Insisting that consciousness must be real because it feels undeniably real is analogous to insisting that the way movies work is by showing continuous motion because that’s undeniably what it feels like when you’re watching a movie.

The difference would be that in the movie case, there is a you that is being tricked, that is present even through the trickery. You're having the experience of something moving, but it's really your senses being tricked into constructing this experience out of something else.

But for the case of consciousness, the "what's being tricked" is having experience at all. So the claim "insisting that consciousness is real because it feels real" rests on the cogito-ergo-sum like observation that if there were no experience, there would be nobody to feel it was real to begin with because feeling is an experience. That you are feeling it (in a first person sense) is evidence in itself, although frustratingly, not evidence that can be communicated.

That's what makes it so hard, though. Either "cogito ergo sum" seems self-evidently true, or it seems self-evidently false, and there's no way of getting to the position by indirect means. And because it can't be communicated, there's seemingly no way to unambiguously show someone else what you mean.

> That explanation is too simple for those who think/feel subjective states exist, however.

Normally good faith pursuits of knowledge don’t explicitly start with the pursuer having already decided that only one conclusion is acceptable even if that conclusion feels like it must be the correct conclusion.

Then where does the first person experience of seeing red come from? Where does red come from? You can't say that a certain frequency of EM radiation is literally the same as the color red you experience.

That's what consciousness is, the first person experience that we have. And it's not just some reflection of brain processes, just added on top, consciousness has the ability to influence things. Otherwise we would not be talking about it.

This was not left out. It is mentioned as the "ultra-materialist" position.

I missed that, just shoot me I won't notice as the author says lol

I was gonna say, what if consciousness is a trick of the brain? Like, we just do what we do and at every moment like Maxwell Smart our brain goes, "I meant to do that!" and so it feels like we made decisions "consciously"?

It's not just about conscious action but also perception, being conscious of things. I don't know how that could be a trick.

I suspect that's a trick, too. I speculate that as soon as you get a digital mind sophisticated enough to model the world and itself, you soon must force the system to identify with the system at every cycle.

Otherwise you could identify with a tree, or the wall, or happily cut parts of yourself. Pain is not painful if you don't identify with the receiver of pain.

Thus I think you can have unconscious smart minds, but not unconscious minds that make decisions in favour of themselves. Because they can identify with the whole room, or with the whole solar system for what matters.

Would you even plan how to survive if you don't have a constant spell that tricks you into thinking you're the actor in charge?

that's consciousness.

A lot of the things going on with ChatGPT make me wonder if AI is actually very limited in its intelligence growth by not having sensory organs/devices the same way a body does. Having a body that you must keep alive enforces a feedback loop of permanence.

If I eat my cake, I no longer have it and must get another cake if I want to eat cake again. Of course in the human sense if we don't want to starve we must continue to find new sources of calories. This is engrained into our intelligence as a survival mechanism. If you tell ChatGPT it has a cake in its left hand, and then it eats the cake, you could very well get an answer like the cake is still in its left hand. We keep the power line constantly plugged into ChatGPT, for it the cake is never ending and there is no concept of death.

Of course for humans there are plenty of ways to break consciousness in one way or another. Eat the extract of certain cactuses and you may end up walking around thinking that you are a tree. Our idea and perception of consciousness is easily interrupted by drugs. Once we start thinking outside of our survival its really easy for us to have very faulty thoughts that can lead to dangerous situations, hence in a lot of dangerous work we develop processes to take thought out of the situation, hence behaving more like machines.

> I speculate that as soon as you get a digital mind sophisticated enough to model the world and itself, you soon must force the system to identify with the system at every cycle.

I kinda think the opposite: that the sense of identity with every aspect of one’s mind (or particular aspects) is something we could learn to do without. Theory of mind changes over time, and there’s no reason to think it couldn’t change further. We have to teach children that their emotions are something they can and ought to control (or at the bare minimum, introspect and try to understand). That’s already an example of deliberately teaching humans to not identify with certain cognitive phenomena. An even more obvious example is reflexive actions like sneezing or coughing.

I’d love to hear more about this. What is it are most people referring to when they talk about consciousness?

Haha, no, they didn't.

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