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Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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.

> 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?

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