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Comment by ttctciyf | Hacker News Reader

If you're saying that a good definition of consciousness does not exist within medicine or biology, then that is (IMO) one way of stating the "hard problem"[1] of consciousness that Chalmers famously posited.

Another way of putting it might be that there is simply no coherent scientific framework within which consciousness is well defined. It seems to have no place in any science-based ontological scheme. It seems outside any established scientific categorization of what exists.

Which is of course what makes consciousness so interesting!

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

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A bit like the gods, in that respect.

Maybe Consciousness doesn't actually exist.

You doubt that you have experiences?

You doubt the existence of thunder and lighting? But surely those prove the might of the great Jupiter!

All joking aside : Of course I'm not particularly married to the position that "Consciousness doesn't exist". But it seems a bit suss that it has been so ill defined for so long. Some days I really do wonder if maybe it belongs in the same pre-scientific category as Vis Vitalis or Luminiferous Ether.

The link between the thunderstorms and Jupiter is theoretical, but our having conscious experience is directly given.

The fact that something for which, unlike phlogiston or the Aether, we have direct incontrovertible evidence (denial of which evidence puts one on pain of having to justify one's own sanity and fitness for discourse), has yet so eluded definition in strict functional / scientific terms, points more to the likelihood we're suffering from some collective conceptual confusion, afaics.

Rather than consciousness being a primitive pre-scientific intellectual construct, perhaps our current scientific / functional ontology will later be regarded as pre-X, where X is the name for whatever resolution of the aforementioned conceptual confusion we achieve such that it allows us to integrate the fact of consciousness into a unified rational account of the universe.

For my statistics, suddenly I really want to know what your (educational/professional) background is. Are you a philosopher, or a psychologist, or a sociologist, or ?

(I'm coming from biology, but that's a big field. Narrowing it down a bit: an eclectic mix of ethology, neurophysiology and bioinformatics)

Your statistics?! Please elaborate! You are exploring possible links between humanities engagement and pathologically convoluted sentence structure, eh? :)

But anyway, my bachelors degree was a "combined major" of comp. sci. / philosophy, several decades ago. I still have a strong interest in philosophy of mind but not in any professional capacity. Hope it helps.

I didn't actually keep track of complexity of sentence structure as a function humanities engagement level yet, but... good idea!

According to my ad-hoc statistics, basically the position on consciousness breaks down as follows:

1. Physics/chemistry: "We don't know what Consciousness is, but let us propose a new particle-of-the-day to explain it"

2. Humanities: "We don't know what Consciousness is, but let us propose a new field of science/state of being to explain it"

3. Life sciences: "We don't know what Consciousness is. The last umpteen-thousand papers explained things in terms of known physics and chemistry, so let's explain Consciousness in terms of known physics and chemistry"

4. IT/AI: "We're all gonna die!" (bonus points for being technically correct at all times)

5. Philosophy of Mathematics <- mathematicians are sort of crazy, philosophers are sort of crazy; crazy^2 might just have some sane(?) words on this. (Alan Turing was one of these, and see what kind of trouble HE kicked up!)

Haha, thanks for the reply, just seen this. Nicely summarized!

I guess I'd come under Humanities as far as my interest in consciousness goes, but I'm more "We don't know what Consciousness is, but let's at least stop trying to pretend it's nothing but X (or Y, or Z)" (Aimed mostly at groups 1 & 3 by your schema, I guess).

I'm technically in group 3, of course, and aware of it.

In defense of "my side" though, I think you're responding to a straw man/stereotype a little bit. (said the person who just listed 5 stereotypes)

For one thing, I tell people to stop saying 'nothing but'. Humans are not 'nothing but' monkeys. Do You Know How Smart Monkeys Are? I say it's an honor to be counted among their kind!

Possibly the other stereotypes have some grain of sanity to them in the same way.

Except Philosophy of Mathematics. Tripping without LSD, that's what they are. And probably wouldn't even deny it when challenged.

Thanks for answering, and have a great day!

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