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Comment by smokel | Hacker News Reader

Consciousness might be overrated. It could simply be a short-term memory of the state you were in.

This is my take. Consciousness is overrated and probably just an emergent phenomena of the brain processing external stimuli into memory, moving memories around, etc etc, in a continuous and never ending flow. Free will is just an illusion of our deterministic but fundamentally random reality.

There isn’t even an agreed upon definition for what consciousness is from a scientific perspective.

And the reason that it is overrated, is because it has to feel special for the bearers because it makes them prioritise their survival.

Consciousness is largely a way to have a reward function for set of behaviours that keep you alive through reason.

It appears at a level where reasoning is intelligent enough that you need a more complex reward function.

This might be an interesting reason for it to feel special, but I'm not entirely convinced, and I probably don't fully understand what you mean.

It seems that not everyone values the having of a consciousness as something special. Survival works pretty well with a good appetite, some muscle for clobbering enemies, and a good sex drive. How does (thinking about) consciousness add an advantage here?

This seems like the secular version of "the devil made me do it". We can't be accountable for any of our actions because we are all just molecular machines playing out their predetermined outcome.

We are molecular machines and although the outcome is predetermined, the only way to find out the outcome, is for the machine itself to follow through its course. So this is exactly opposite of "devil made me do it" because you do something not because of external force or because of random chance but because of initial state of the machine which makes you who you are.

So when a person commits a crime, they can just say: "the initial state of my molecular machine made me do it!" ...?

To me that is exactly the same as saying "the devil made me do it!"

i.e. both things are euphemisms for "I'm not accountable for my actions"; "I'm not at fault"; "It was beyond my control", etc.

And if you truly believe there is no such thing as free will and that everything is predetermined, then you'd have to agree. Hitler can't be held accountable for his choices; his actions were all predetermined and his fate was sealed at the big bang; he just got an unlucky "initial state".

Since you are exactly the molecular machine, nothing more and nothing less, saying "the initial state of my molecular machine made me do it" is same as saying "the initial state of my self made me do it". So it does not mean that you should not be accountable, on the contrary it means that the action was caused by your essence, what makes you you, and not some outside entity or random chance.

As for the free will, it means that the behavior of a molecular machine depends on machine itself, not on far away stars or a random number generator. One can't say that he got unlucky initial state, because he _is_ that unlucky state. Any change of the state would create someone entirely different. Moreover Stephen Wolfram's computational irreducibility principle implies that despite all the information being contained in initial state, only way to extract predictions from that state is to run the molecular machine and observe its behavior.

Where did GP use this view to argue for the abolishment of the criminal justice system?

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