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Comment by bananabiscuit | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible consciousness will not be ever explained by physical sciences because it is exactly outside of the domain of what science was invented to explain?

Physical science takes on as axioms that the laws of physics are uniform everywhere and that there is no preferred observer. The experience of consciousness is exactly opposite to those two things. It very much is the consequence of you being a preferred observer and experiencing the physics around you in a way that physics assumes no thing can.

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But it's so fun watching people spend time and money chasing their shadow. And considering that materialism is still the academic consensus on consciousness by a wide margin, it might be quite the spectacle for still many years to come.

Though, there's a tiny, but growing, idealist movement, where all the fun is being had. Last year I was acquainted with the works of Don Hoffman and Bernardo Kastrup. To anyone interested in a rational and difficult to refute discourse on the proposition that consciousness, not space-time (i.e. matter), is fundamental, I suggest as an introduction their respective interviews with Zubin Damania. Dense in content, yet made accessible. One of the most transformative rabbit holes I've ever gotten into.

Here's the red pill :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dd6CQCbk2ro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZWp0bnMBbM

This will always fail because the premise is wrong. Consciousness does not arise in the brain. Brain activity correlates to impressions in consciousness, but consciousness is not a “thing”. Consciousness is equivalent to identity. You are that which sees all this that you see. Consciousness IS you. You don’t arise in your own brain.

This is nonsense. You don't lose your identity when you fall asleep. Consciousness is clearly a thing that you can have or not have.

A brain can exist without it being conscious.

You don't "lose" consciousness when you fall asleep. Sleep is not the absence of consciousness, but the consciousness of absence. What's missing is what you think of as your "mind". If that's not the case, then ask yourself who is it that is sleeping? What registers the coming and going of the mind? That's you, the consciousness. If consciousness was going away, you would never know that you slept.

Have you ever met someone who recently had a severe stroke or suffers dementia? Their sense of self can be completely lost by such trauma. Sure they still have identity in the memories of others. But I'd say one must distinguish identity from Self.

You don't lose your consciousness when you fall asleep. You time travel to the point where you wake up.

As someone who has some oddities around sleep and consciousness (sleep paralysis, lucid dreaming, self-awareness during the process of falling asleep, and a couple of other similar experiences that are extremely difficult to describe), which I suspect may caused by undiagnosed narcolepsy, it is clear to me that sleep is a much more complex process than that and does not necessarily involve loss of consciousness.

Indeed, even people with normal, healthy sleep patterns still dream during the REM portion of sleep, even if they do not remember it later. Consciousness is not an on/off thing.

That’s not true though. If that were the case you wouldn’t be able to sleep off an argument.

Sleep clears the system and reboots it. That’s why all your short term memory gets wiped too if it wasn’t written to disk.

That's a distinction without a difference.

“Given my chosen definition of consciousness as XYZ, is it possible that consciousness is XYZ?”

Alternatively, "Given my chosen definition of the world, I will define consciousness so that it is not XYZ".

I’m going based on what my experience of consciousness is. Why do I need to look up some definition when I can just refer to any given second of my experience on this earth to see what it is and what properties it has?

It's a very good question but I don't think it's impossible to probe what consciousness is merely because we can only directly experience our own consciousness.

There are plenty of other things that we can't directly experience but we can still use science to investigate them through indirect observations.

I think the biggest insights into consciousness so far have come from people with brain traumas and dysfunctional. E.g. people who have had their brain halves cut, or that guy who got most of his brain taken out by a bit of rail, or the Memento guy.

And it definitely is a thing that exists in our physical universe. A very weird thing, sure, but science doesn't say stuff can't be weird. We can definitely learn about it.

Maybe we'll never learn fundamentally what it is, but that's true of normal physical things like atoms and time too.

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