umop_3pisdn said:I don't understand this conclusion, awareness/consciousness is the only thing that we can positively assert isn't wholly illusion, because it is the only thing that we can know via direct experience, "being" is essentially the strongest kind of knowledge claim that there is, a person could easily argue that it's more reliable than something like science which presupposes naturalism without the epistemology to justify it. I mean, consciousness may be illusory (likely everything is), but establishing reality according to what we can actually know is less of a waste of time than striving for an objective understanding of the universe which is and will always be impossible.
LCGeek said:While I like your last line. I find it more effective we should understand the universes laws according to the needs a society or culture maybe facing. True it's impossible to understand all for a variety of factors mainly time, though we I hope this doesn't mean we shouldn't strive at all.
DanteFox said:This is a bunch of BS. If running information processing rapidly in parallel in one centralized unit were all it took to achieve consciousness, why aren't computers conscious?
Computers lack the structural dynamism of a living organism. Perhaps when we finally create a computer that also adapts its mechanisms physically over time it will achieve "consciousness"DanteFox said:This is a bunch of BS. If running information processing rapidly in parallel in one centralized unit were all it took to achieve consciousness, why aren't computers conscious? Is there some threshold for computational power that dictates when consciousness is achieved? Why should those calculations and transmissions all coalesce into one consciousness? Why not multiple, separate consciousnesses?
Do you believe the universe operates in a solely naturalistic way? If so, how can a sum of many physical parts produce something non-physical?
The_Technomancer said:Computers lack the structural dynamism of a living organism. Perhaps when we finally create a computer that also adapts its mechanisms physically over time it will achieve "consciousness"
umop_3pisdn said:I don't understand this conclusion, awareness/consciousness is the only thing that we can positively assert isn't wholly illusion, because it is the only thing that we can know via direct experience, "being" is essentially the strongest kind of knowledge claim that there is, a person could easily argue that it's more reliable than something like science which presupposes naturalism without the epistemology to justify it. I mean, consciousness may be illusory (likely everything is), but establishing reality according to what we can actually know is less of a waste of time than striving for an objective understanding of the universe which is and will always be impossible.
Zaptruder said:It is illusory in the sense that it does not operate in the manner that we intuitively expect it to from the manner in which we experience it.
The experience of consciousness is nonetheless the same whether or not we believe it is the result of a soul, or the result of electro-chemical processes in a complex adaptive bio-machine.
umop_3pisdn said:I don't really understand what you're saying here, but I'd consider our expectations 'less real' since it's elaborative, as opposed to say direct experience. But again I'm not really following your meaning.
Zaptruder said:As in it's only illusory in so far as we don't understand what it is we're experiencing directly. Just like many magician illusions appear magical because we don't understand intuitively the sleight of hands that they use to exploit our natural attentional limits.
What we intuitively think we're experiencing is not actually what we're experiencing. It's an attributional mistake.
We've made it plenty of times in our past - coming up with explanations that didn't properly reflect the reality of the situation.
In real terms, in the context of what we're talking about - consciousness is illusory in the sense that it feels like we're controlling our bodies and minds with this thing called consciousness - when in truth, we (as in our perception of consciousness) are simply 'too large' and 'too slow' to properly (intuitively, as opposed to properly, through deduction) grasp what's happening at the level that our brain - which makes sense, because 'we' are emergent from the functions of our brains - there's no way we could be 'fast' and 'small' enough to intuitively examine what's going on down there.
But irrespective of what we do or don't know about the experience of consciousness - it still feels the same. It doesn't magically change into something else upon discovering its true nature.
umop_3pisdn said:Well, we do understand what we're experiencing (if we attend to it in the right way, experience is self-sufficient), rather we've habituated ourselves to add additional meanings to our experience which further separate us from what 'is', because now we're focusing on our perceptions about our experiences instead of the experience itself, like the magic example that you mentioned. But that isn't something inherently concomitant because it's not impossible to reduce or potentially eliminate that elaboration as that's essentially the aim of phenomenological psychology or the Buddhist religion (to realize the 'unconditioned' in the case of the latter).
We can observe our subjective phenomenon as a scientist would, and effectively understand 'consciousness' that way, which really is the most promising avenue imo, more so than observing it from the outside and neglecting the experiential aspect. I'm sure the perceived quality of our experience would change a lot if we proceeded to trace the threads of our awareness back to their point of origin (phenomenological psychology), because we would come to know for ourselves in terms of bare experience the conditions from which they emerge, effectively cutting away at delusion and elaboration in the process. But I'm not sure how relevant this is to this discussion.
Perhaps we need an established definition of what 'consciousness' is. I'm essentially using it as a synonym for awareness since that's probably the most broad way that it can be applied, in which case consciousness certainly isn't an illusion for epistemological reasons. If you're meaning more something like 'self concept', then I'd agree that it is an illusion and that 'self' is likely elaboration. Again, I think we're addressing this in different ways. My interest is more phenomenological because I think that approach is more promising, at least on a level that actually matters to us as subjective beings.
Zaptruder said:I gotcha. Yes, our use of consciousness does differ - I use consciousness as in its colloquial sense, disambiguating it from awareness.
As for awareness - it would seem that any system that can capture and process information would be in a sense aware - of the information to which it was designed to process and capture.
In our case, our brains allows us to capture and process not just sensory information, but higher levels of abstraction - from colours to the identification of edges and objects - up to understanding the context of those objects relative to their current location, history, etc, etc.
It's also conceivable that other intelligences could be aware of more still - either sensory awareness - able to sense additional EM-wavelengths, or even greater levels of abstraction (capturing sensory information from a wide area - like the size of a city - and identifying patterns of behaviour in the movement of people, traffic, electricity, weather patterns, etc).
