Comment by telmo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by telmo | Hacker News Reader

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Consciousness is the thing and the only thing that you have direct experience of. Everything else could be an illusion. You could be a brain in a jar and all of the reality you perceive be a simulation, but you would still be conscious.

I know that I am conscious and I cannot doubt it, but at the same time I cannot prove it to you. Furthermore, I strongly suspect and assume that other human beings are conscious, but I cannot verify this scientifically (i.e. measure it somehow).

This means that consciousness is a phenomenon that cannot be doubted (in the first person) but possibly eludes the scientific method. This really grates people who have a strong emotional attachment to the dogma that science must be able to account for all of reality.

People confuse the metaphysical commitment of materialism with scientific fact, and thus conclude that consciousness must be an emergent phenomenon of neural complexity, and that it is silly to believe that anything else could be conscious. This feels like an hyper-rational, scientific stance, but really it is not. Science works perfectly fine within other metaphysical commitments such as idealism, panpsychism, etc.

This is not to say that materialism is not correct, I do not know if it is or not. My point is that many contemporary "scientific types" tend to believe that their certainty about materialism being the correct framework is grounded on science, when it is not. It is often an unexamined and quasi-religious belief.

> Furthermore, I strongly suspect and assume that other human beings are conscious, but I cannot verify this scientifically (i.e. measure it somehow).

I don't think this is fully true, if you really examine this belief. You do have certain criteria that you use to determine, at least quasi-scientifically, if you should believe that some other entity is conscious or not. You say you believe "humans beings are conscious", but I would bet you don't believe that dead human beings are conscious, or that fertilized eggs are conscious. You may or may not believe that they are still conscious while under general anaesthesia, or while they are in clinical death. You may very much believe that certain things that are not human beings are also conscious - maybe dogs, or even all mammals, or even all vertebrates.

Your criteria probably start from the initial premise: I am conscious. Then, you apply a simple argument: I perform certain actions and/or display certain behaviors, and I have this conscious motivation for them. This other being performs these behaviors very similarly, so they probably have a similar consciousness motivating them to do so. You then test this assumption, and come up with more refined observations (e.g. not every similarity is equally related to consciousness - for example, you move around, and shadows move around, but it seems unlikely that shadows have consciousness so perhaps "move around" is not a good test for consciousness).

I understand the argument but I disagree and would phrase it the other way around. We don't have evidence of conscious experience because we don't have evidence for a division between conscious experience and "existence/physical stuff" in the first place. This division is created by our brains and the model we have of the world but in reality the only evidence we have is that something exists.

Therefore, what we call subjective experience is evidence for the existence of what we experience, but until we can empirically show that there is a difference between what we experience and what reality is, the only thing we can say is that it exists. Also, that's the problem with the hard problem of consciousness - it assumes a division between the two, and we have no evidence of such a division. And lastly if it's not clear i am not a panpsychist either because that assumes a division on some level again. We don't know what existence itself is and how it functions really, at least not the brains function within existence.

> Therefore, what we call subjective experience is evidence for the existence of what we experience, but until we can empirically show that there is a difference between what we experience and what reality is, the only thing we can say is that it exists.

The division is between our third-person descriptions of reality in science, and our first-person "experience". You can't logically derive a first-person perspective only from third-person facts. That's what's at the heart of the hard problem. The eliminativist simply says that the first-person facts are a cognitive illusion, and so we really only have third-person facts, and the panpsychist says all third-person facts have an accompanying first-person component most of which we can't access.

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