The nature of our experience of reality remains elusive

Re:The nature of our experience of reality remains elusive by quotemstr on Saturday July 21, 2018 @01:44PM (#17582878)

I mean: what would an answer even look like? At what point would questioners be able to say "Yes. That's it. That's the nature of consciousness!"? What would constitute even a partial answer?

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Re:The nature of our experience of reality remains elusive by felipeko on Saturday July 21, 2018 @02:38PM (#17583179)

You should be able to answer things about it:

Is it a fundamental or emergent property of the universe?

What is the smallest/biggest structure possible for a consciousness to happen? (we should be able to tell what is conscious and what is not)

Can/do laws of physics account for it? (consciousness is not a necessary thing in physics, we are all p-zombies for physics laws, but for some reason it is able to affect the causal chain, as we are talking about it)

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Re:The nature of our experience of reality remains elusive by TeMPOraL on Monday July 23, 2018 @01:14AM (#17590727)

This alone tells me that "consciousness" is an ill-defined term.

> Can/do laws of physics account for it?

Either you define the word in such a way that they can, or the discussion becomes meaningless.

I think fundamental point often missed when discussing this topic (and similar philosophical issues) is that a thing can be either measurable in principle (even if not with our current understanding or technology), or it doesn't exist and there's no meaning in asking about it. I arrive at this statement through following chain of reasoning: there is no sense talking about things that do not impact observable reality in any way, since the world will be identical with and without them (and thus there's no way to assert those things exist, as opposed to e.g. an infinite family of similar-but-not-quite-the-same things). And if a thing does impact observable reality, then - in principle - we should be able to observe its impact, and that opens it up for measurement and understanding, and thus puts it squarely in the domain of physics.

So for the term "consciousness" to be meaningful, it must be defined in a way that it makes a physical difference in the world. Some bit in a brain must go to 0 if you have a consciousness, whereas it must go to 1 if you are a p-zombie. If there's no possible way to - even in principle - differentiate between a conscious mind and a p-zombie, it implies that both terms are nonsense (and also useless).

INB4 uncertainty principle - it doesn't mean there are things that can't be measured hidden behind some "quantum veil"; it means that this is where our usual conceptual models (like position and momentum being separate qualities) break down and no longer correspond well to reality.

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Re:The nature of our experience of reality remains elusive by hshehehjdjdjd on Saturday July 21, 2018 @05:42PM (#17584015)

Fundamental or emergent? What does that even mean?

Like nearly everything else in reality, you’d expect consciousness to be continuous, not integral. We know there are diminished states of consciousness by experience and observation. As such there wouldn’t be any lower limit on size of conscious objects, just smaller and smaller degrees of consciousness.

Yes, the laws of physics of course account for it. Everything that exists arises from physics.

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Re:The nature of our experience of reality remains elusive by TheOtherHobbes on Saturday July 21, 2018 @08:18PM (#17584592)

Do you mean the laws of physics that can only ever be abstractions of our subjective experience?

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Re:The nature of our experience of reality remains elusive by hshehehjdjdjd on Sunday July 22, 2018 @09:47PM (#17589960)

No, I mean the laws that would still be making planets orbit the sun even if none of us were here to experience it, and indeed which had been doing for billions of years before we were here.

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