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Comment by igravious | Hacker News Reader

I could not in good conscience recommend The Emperor's New Mind to anyone. It is front-loaded with science and math and topped off with rubbish conjectures masquerading as truth. Yay for Penrose tiles and all that but steer clear of this book.

There is no science of consciousness because there is no science of subjectivity because science deals with objective reality, the world of objects. So we need to extend the scientific method to deal with subjects and I'm not aware of much progress in that area bar a few unknown figures in the world of cybernetic research.

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There is indeed a science of consciousness, such as with anesthesiology or pharmacology. These sciences are concerned with the space of awareness of a subject.

I'd also say that there is an objectivity to subjective perception; for example, if two travelers in space find that the distance between themselves is shrinking, while either party may justly argue that it is the opposing side that is moving, and that we are standing still (or some other possible combination), we can still both make objective agreements on what the other party may subjectively see.

We can objectively know that the other party is equally clueless as us in determining our velocities.

I personally think there is an enormous benefit to science to understanding subjective perception. I imagine the problem of distributed AI's having different perceptions, and having to make sense of their different perceptions in order to solve problems.

I meant consciousness as reflexive self-awareness, not in the sense of being alert and awake as opposed to asleep or anesthetized or in a coma or whatnot but these mental 'states' are interesting as well.

I think we're still on the same page for consciousness; we're just using different words, except for the fact that you add a reflexive (or feedback) component to consciousness, which I think is an appropriate addition.

I still maintain that there is an objective study to subjectivity, and that the few examples I talked about are of good relevance to our understanding of consciousness.

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