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Comment by kukkeliskuu | Hacker News Reader

Many of us share the experience that we have been driving for an hour, and end up safely at home, but do not remember anything about it.

So we can fully operate in some kind of wakeful "sleep" state.

This tells us that "consciousness" is not constant, but fluctuates, and above certain threshold we can remember what happened. Unless we specifically observe this phenomena while it happens, we will reconstruct a "memory" of being conscious.

According to some meditation traditions, it is possible to learn to slowly increase the consciousness, mainly by learning to stop leaking out attention. Attention is the key to the consciousness.

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Your ability to remember later does not diminish your consciousness in the present.

Was all of life in hindsight lived unconsciously after developing dementia?

I have had many lucid dreams that I did not immediately recall, but only a bit later after something reminded me of them. Suddenly I remember being conscious, whereas before I assumed I was out.

Again, memory is a tricky thing and I would be cautious in linking it to consciousness - the experience - itself.

If there is such a thing as consciousness (a big if), then why would it disappear on the long drive home? Just because you've tasked some lesser software routine with the responsibility of not turning you into road pizza doesn't mean you're functionally unconscious?

I've heard this described before, and those people are daydreaming. Or chewing on a particular problem they couldn't crack in the work day. Or hell, some of them seem to "listen to music" in their head.

The trouble with "consciousness" is that humans can't really define it in a meaningful way, but they're absolutely certain that it's a real thing and it makes them important.

> If there is such a thing as consciousness (a big if)

How is that a big if? As Descartes showed, it is literally the one thing each of us can be absolutely certain about.

We don't have a definition of consciousness that allows you to determine whether a rock is conscious or not.

Moot point, following Descartes definition you can only ascertain you own consciousness, you can't even determine if another person is conscious.

Sure, but consciousness as a phenomenon does exist. I know this with absolute certainty, because I'm conscious typing this right now.

How do you know this with absolute certainty?

That I exist as a thinking, feeling, observing entity? That’s kinda self-evident, no?

The trick with this is that most people do not question what "I" refers to in such a statement.

I don't see how that is relevant?

I exist as a conscious, thinking, feeling, perceiving entity. Y'all might be NPCs but I know I exist, whatever the hell that means. Nothing you can say will ever convince me otherwise: I have direct knowledge that I experience conscious awareness.

Ergo, I have an existence proof that consciousness exists, because I myself am an example of it. Anyone arguing that consciousness doesn't exist is going to get a dry smirk from me and a sad shake of the head. I know otherwise.

What "I" am in the larger sphere of things doesn't even enter into this.

If you have decided that nothing anybody says will convince you otherwise, then you are not approaching the issue with an open mind and that is not a very fruitful way to learn.

At the root here is the very basic observation from psychology and neuroscience that we cannot trust our thinking of our memory about our experience.

You don’t need to believe that observation. If you are open to learning, you can make experiments on yourself to convince yourself that this is the case. But if you are unwilling to openly approach the question whether all those scientists might have a point, of course there is nothing that can be done.

It doesn't. No one in this thread has bothered to describe, even casually, what they think this "consciousness" is. It exists only in your not-very-impressive imaginations.

If any of you were even slightly clever, you would have recognized that your arguments are entirely religious in nature, that only the terminology has been switched up (that only barely) so that you can pretend otherwise.

Go. Look through the comments. The evidence you human things find sufficient for consciousness sum up to little more than your constant whiny, excitable assertions that it's a real phenomenon, and you really really exhibit it.

Never have I ever been so obviously gaslit in my life.

Consciousness is an ability to have subjective experience.

There are no subjective experiences, just bad software. Your bad meat software constantly creates illusions that you believe to be real because you're not really rational enough to question those.

Of all the peculiar software qualities you might have appealed to as consciousness, you choose the one that's the most plainly defective?

My memory confabulation begins just 480 milliseconds after the event occurred, therefor I have a transcendent soul! My sensory organs are so poorly adapted, NNs have to fabricate entire swaths of data just for me to navigate the physical world, therefor I have an ineffable mind that sets me apart from all other lumps of matter!

> that you believe to be real

Think about what you just said there.

That's a false dichotomy, consciousness doesn't imply supernatural soul or humanism.

In one sense it is less religious than your approach, because you don’t need to believe anything, just approach the issue with an open mind and do some experiments.

It is more religious in the sense that some ”religions” are closer to science and philosophy with regard to these issues, because they teach you the methods to run these experiments instead of just wiseacring about them.

It is not scientific in the sense that scientific equipment is currently not sensitive enough to for example measure the weight of a thought, although there appears to be nothing that would theoreticslly prevent that.

In short consciousness you talk about is just an illusion created by your mind. A lie you make up so you are more convincing liar when talking to others, trying to prove you are a good person so that they do not throw you out of the ”group” i.e. society.

From your experience it is impossible to talk about consciousness as you have not experienced heightened levels of consicousness.

To have a meaningful discussion we need to have shared experiences, and to have shared experiences you need to run some experiments on yourself, and to run those you need to be open and interested in learning.

> If there is such a thing as consciousness (a big if)

There plainly is such a thing. The only people who would question it are those who don't have it, and those who haven't noticed that they have it.

You might not notice you have it, in the same way that fish might not notice the water. Just consider that it's not automatically the case that you are aware of your own existence. Inanimate objects, and lesser lifeforms, aren't aware of their own existence, so something about you makes you different from them. If you call that thing something other than "consciousness", then that's fine, but it's just a different name for the same thing.

> There plainly is such a thing. The only people who would question it are those who don't have it, and those who haven't noticed that they have it.

How is that different than a soul?

> aren't aware of their own existence, so something about you makes you different from them. I

I see no discernible difference in that regard. That I string words together in a way that seems interesting isn't evidence that I'm conscious. It's evidence that there's some interesting algorithm hardwired into my brain meat. There's no magic there, no spirit, and it's embarrassing that you believe there is and that it's somehow akin to rationality for you to believe it.

> There's no magic there, no spirit

Just for the sake of argument. If there was "magic" and "spirit", how would you tell? What properties would you expect to observe?

I would expect elements of those phenomenon to exist outside of human skulls, and to be manipulable in such a way that instruments could be constructed that use those principles to detect souls in human skulls.

They'd also be empirical in that no other simpler/more-rational explanation exists for the properties they exhibit.

This is plainly obvious. You're incapable of coming up with something like this, because you're a p-zombie. Like those LLMs we read about on this site, you can't imagine anything that hasn't been part of your training corpus. Novel, intelligent ideas are beyond you unless they previously existed and you have been exposed to those already.

Why did you even have to ask your rhetorical question? Your consciousness is an illusion. You can't even properly understand this comment I've written. The manner in which you'll respond to it is perfectly predictable.

Consciousness is the only thing that cannot be an illusion.

Consciousness isn't the illusion, it's the audience for the illusion. What's an illusion if it isn't fooling anyone?

I don't know. If you think the interesting part about consciousness is that you can write, then maybe you actually don't have consciousness?

I think it's more likely that you are just as conscious as everyone else and you just haven't noticed how incredibly weird it is that you are aware of anything at all.

> It's evidence that there's some interesting algorithm hardwired into my brain meat. There's no magic there, no spirit

Magic is just a name for things we don't understand. If you say there's "something" to hand wave it away, but can't define it, how is it different then calling it "magic" or "consciousness" or "spirit"? You made no progress, you just pointed out you know as little as anyone else.

>then why would it disappear on the long drive home?

Thinking is expensive, so it's optimized with reflexes.

Maybe we could define consciousness as a threshold of attention. Maybe some complex systems exhibit what we call consciousness when it can muster enough attention to become reflexive.

Thinking is certainly expensive for some. Sprinting is expensive for fat people because they don't do as much of it as they believe themselves to.

"why would it disappear on the long drive home?"

The phenomenon exists and may be observed regardless of whether we know why it exists. We are complex beings and there is probably no simple explanation for this.

"Just because you've tasked some lesser software routine with the responsibility of not turning you into road pizza doesn't mean you're functionally unconscious?"

I am not claiming the driver is functionally unconscious, but that there is a distinct level of consciousness between unconscious and fully conscious where you are able to carry out complex operations without being fully conscious. Obviously you cannot drive a car if you are functionally unconscious. You can also say some subsystem is handling the driving. But calling it "tasking" means you consciously decide to delegate the work. My experience is that I have not consciously decided to delegate the work in such situations.

"The trouble with "consciousness" is that humans can't really define it in a meaningful way, but they're absolutely certain that it's a real thing and it makes them important."

The phenomenon can be observed and experienced, if you are open to it, regardless of whether we call it consciousness or not. And once you have the experience, it is easier to talk about consciousness in sensible manner.

People can be conscious and not remember. Alzheimer patients are a clear example.

A model of memory (there are more) says that we form "traces" of events by transferring from short-term to long-term memory, but that these traces need to be fixed to stay memories. This process can go wrong in many ways, but traces can also be forgotten or replaced. E.g., when I go to bed, I know/remember that I've locked the front door, but I can't remember that I locked it yesterday. I suppose I did, but I have little to no recollection of it. In computer metaphors, it's as if this event only has a trace to a single place in memory.

What this makes me think is that consciousness is the non-autonomous part of our experience.

I now wonder if we are in a ‘learning mode’ when we’re having a conscious experience.

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