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Comment by surfsvammel | Hacker News Reader

The brain is a strange thing. Perception and experience is very difficult to wrap one's head around.

I have fainted several times, for different reasons. Often in medical settings but also in other settings. Often when I wake up I am in a state where I feel like I’ve been gone for hours, it feels like I’ve been basically dreaming the equivalent of a full length movie, when in reality I’ve been out for maybe a minute.

It’s strange. It seems impossible to decide what I actually experienced and what I, after the fact, believe I experienced.

I reason about the “life flashes before my eyes” concept similarly. I believe in fact it doesn’t, that a persons brain just makes one believe that has happened, after the fact. But. What do I know.

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I experienced the “life flashing before my eyes” once. It was a situation where I thought I was about to die. It was like a very high speed real of all my memories playing. I was amazed (while it was happening) that it was happening just like I’d heard about - so at least in my opinion it wasn’t an invented memory later. Of course I might say that even it was. My theory is the mind was desperately trying to find a similar situation as a hint of how to get out of the current situation, but it’s just a guess. I lived :)

Amazing -- could you describe it a bit more?

Well, I was with someone who had threatened to kill me, and I took that threat very seriously, as it was also made very seriously. It was sort of watching a film that was doing fast forward through my life. I could see it playing in front of me. I guess the room was there in the background. The whole thing took place in about 5 seconds, and my background thought (besides being concerned about dying) was just sort of “huh, so this really happens”. The person then showed that they weren’t going to kill me, but explained how they had been planning it earlier in the day. I never visited that person again.

Wow -- thanks for sharing.

I almost died at 10 years old from choking. I had some of my life replay like a PowerPoint floating above my vision, where each would float and fade in from the left in a cinematic vignette, then float to the right and fade out as the next came in. I had a distinct sense that I was about to die, and my overwhelming feeling was “wow totally lame I can’t believe I’m dying of choking”. Then a soda was given to me and it dissolved the blockage.

I am religious. I believe in life after death of some sort. I don’t see any evolutionary purpose for seeing a life review before death. I believe the creator made the universe and we have a purpose within it, even after death.

It's not necessary to have an experience that lasts hours in order to have a memory of an experience that lasted hours, even less necessary if it's just the feeling of an experience that lasted hours.

Our memory is highly fallible and easily manipulated, at least compared to how much people tend to believe it's a flawless record of the past.

All memories exist in the present, a memory created a minute ago about an experience a year ago would feel just as real as the memory created a year ago - probably even more so, given how fresh it would be.

Everything I read about near death experiences suggests to me that it's a brain making things up, coupled with more stimuli being processed by the "dead" patient's brain than people assume is possible - accounting, I think, very well for the "things the patient could not have known".

There is no life after death, and there is no existence separate to the body - before our birth we were not; now we are; at some point, we won't be again.

I have the same conclusions as you, but don't have the confidence to state them so matter-of-factly. There seems a rather large amount of room for "we don't know." And, given that it may not be a testable hypothesis and thus outside the realm of science, there's even room for "we may never know."

And before people get in a huff, the same generally goes for the hard problem of consciousness, yet we generally don't go around doubting that others have subjective experience.

I state it matter-of-factly because I believe the idea of it being supernatural lacks evidence of any sort; there's no reason at all to make that hypothesis in the first place. I feel like the studies (or at least the reporting of the studies) come at the question from the wrong direction - the hypothesis should be that all of these experiences have explanations grounded in the function of the brain and body, because the opposite approach is, as you point out, unfalsifiable.

Naturally we don't know, which is why we should assume the explanation that is grounded in reality until it is proven otherwise - especially when the effect of the supernatural answer being true is indistinguishable from the natural answer. If all life after death amounts to in how it affects the living is knowing that the "tunnel of light" is real (but not what lies beyond that), then what use is that information compared to just believing it to be imaginary?

I understand your point. And if you also want to take a strictly materialistic worldview, there’s nothing wrong with it. But what’s strange to me is when people take such a hard line in one area but don’t apply the same logic to another. Would you, for example, extend that same logic to claim your loved ones are philosophical zombies incapable of subjective experience? After all, there’s no good proof of the hard problem of consciousness and it’s likely an untestable claim as well. If you reply with “yes, but…” all it really means is you are either cherry picking where to apply the logic or you recognize there are limits to what science can test/prove and there may be elements outside that domain.

Better yet, consciousness as you’re describing it here is most likely an illusory artifact and evolutionary adaptation, particularly useful for survival and group cooperation. I wouldn’t be so quick to assume about the OP.

With that being said I think it’s fair to suggest we can’t prove that others are conscious but we can do a lot more here with science than we can with the alleged afterlife.

I think that’s why it’s generally broken down into the “easy” and “hard” problems of consciousness. Easy in the sense that we can use our existing scientific toolset; hard as in we cannot.

Sure but as it relates to the after-life there's not even a "hard" problem to speak of because there is nothing we can assert except that maybe it is the same experience as the one before birth.

We can't effectively use the tools of science here (at least yet), whereas with consciousness and conscious experience we can at least grapple around the edges.

How can we grapple with the edges of the hard problem, except at a philosophical level? To me, that sounds very much like the afterlife debate. I think it just feels different because we each have an innate “feeling” of subjective experience that’s not easy to dismiss.

I apply the same logic in all cases (as much as any fallible person can), which in your example leads me to assume just as confidently that of course other people have subjective experiences and obviously exist separate to my self. It's the logical conclusion using the same reasoning behind believing the after-life does not exist.

I believe consciousness is an emergent property of the of the brain and body, and the associated connections and (physical/chemical/electrical/etc) interactions

In that context, subjective experiences exist just as much as anything else does, obeying all the laws of physics.

I don't understand why people think the problem is hard, except for hoping and wishing that it is?

It’s usually not considered hard only by those who don’t recognize the difference between the hard and soft problem of consciousness. (And of course, those people exist)

Can you prove to me, an external observer, that you have subjective experience? Can you prove the “redness” you see?[1] You really can’t, and that’s why the problem is hard. You can show brain scans, you can explain the interaction of wavelength on the eye etc. but that describes objective, not subjective, experience. So by your previous logic, your subjective experience does not exist because it’s not provable. Or, more relevant to HN, can you pinpoint when adding those systems to a computer suddenly makes subjective experience emerges in the machine?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument

Subjective experience is measurable and provable:

I have something that is defined as "subjective experience". That subjective experience exists - as a physical, measurable, system; an emergent phenomenon of the composition and interaction of my brain, body and associated inputs - and it stands to reason that everyone else with the same comparable physical existence also has the same kind of subjective experience.

I think the issues that you describe are only problems of definition and categorisation. It seems me you're basically saying subjective experience is defined as "something impossible to prove" which yeah if you want it that way sure, it's impossible.

I’m not saying subjective experience is by definition that which is unprovable. I’m saying there is a different type of information that may be outside the measure ability of scientific methods. I’m saying there is a different experience being had by a conscious being seeing the redness of something vs something inanimate processing the information of red light.

From the link above, despite Mary knowing everything objective there is to know about color,

“The central question of the thought experiment is whether Mary will gain new knowledge when she goes outside the colorless world and experiences seeing in color.”

By your statement above, it sounds like you define consciousness as a level of information processing. So do you think anything that processes information is conscious? Or is there a tipping point where consciousness emerges? If so, how do you measure when a plant or animal or machine crosses that threshold? That is, how do you measure qualia? You claim that conscious experience is a measurable phenomenon but that makes me think you don’t recognize the distinction between the easy and hard problem of consciousness. You actually describe the hard problem in terms if the definition of the easy problem. (Which is fine, and plenty of people have that view, but it’s a different point than seems debated here and it’s imperative to not conflate the two. You might as well just say there is no hard problem)

There is experience after your before-birth, though; how do you know there won't be another experience after your death? Maybe it takes a trillion trillion years, and the collapse and rebirth of the entire universe; but all that would happen in subjectively no time at all.

That is a bit biased too. We don't know what the people actually dead experienced.

I have fainted twice. The first time, I cannot have been unconscious more than max 5 minutes, probably quite a bit less. But it felt like waking up well rested after a long nights good sleep. But I was very fortunate. I was very close to have hit my neck in a table when falling backwards. Then I most likely would never have woken up.

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