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Comment by dtf | Hacker News Reader

I remember an aside in a neuroscience textbook which asked if, one day, a mystery like "where consciousness comes from" might seem as oddly posed as "where life comes from". Once you've broken "life" into its biological and chemical components - cells, proteins, chemical reactions - incredibly complex as they all are, the notion of "life", or of some kind of essential "life force" just kind of disintegrates. Once you get down to that microscopic level, the illusion breaks down.

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But with life, everything is physically observable. How you would observe conscious experience in something other than yourself? I don't mean the behaviors associated with consciousness, but conscious awareness itself?

People do a lot of handwaving around this issue and claim we've got it cracked just because we sorta know how the brain works, and yet we don't have a way even to detect whether this thing we're talking about exists. Much less do we know how it works, or how it's created. Our supposed scientific explanations are just a lot of mumbo jumbo when we can't even measure the thing we're talking about. We can detect brain activity, but we're just assuming that's the same thing.

I think ultimately this will be resolved experimentally, but we're a long way from accomplishing that.

I think the point is that we perhaps should not expect to find a particular mechanism for consciousness, any more than we should expect to find a life-force.

It could be that the "feeling" of consciousness is just something that comes from being a massively-parallel, unsupervised learning machine.

Why are we drawing the line at "cells", "proteins" and "chemical reactions", you're going to have to get to the most fundamental level to really break down the illusion.

I don't think we do. There are lots of chemical reactions in the world, happening all the time. ~99.999% of them don't then beget further reactions. The rest are the ones we refer to as 'life'. I'm not sure if anyone would ever need a more complex idea for life than that.

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