What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

Re:What’s so hard about understanding consciousness? by harperlee on Friday February 04, 2022 @03:48PM (#30212961)

> you can distinguish between sensory input, and therefore are experiencing something

You are assuming “you” is a unique, atomic thing here.

When your fingers curl due to being immersed in water (which is a neurological thing, not a physical thing!), your conscious mind does not experience the humidity, the finger curling system does. You just experience the effect of the skin curling through sight and touch, afterwards.

There are several other systems in our body that react to an environment that we are barely conscious of, and “barely” is being generous. Those seems like a counterexample of your “we can't not be conscious if we experience”.

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Re:What’s so hard about understanding consciousness? by abletonlive on Friday February 04, 2022 @03:55PM (#30213060)

Yes but see, in your example, I would then say your fingers are conscious, too. Or that there is an experience of being a finger. Who, besides the finger, could say otherwise? Just because you've moved the experience from me having it, to the finger having it, doesn't mean that the experience disappeared.

The problem is yet again w/ the definition of having an experience, as I said in my reply to the parent. It's just language, and the reason why we find ourselves in some kind of linguistic paradox trying to explain it.

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Re:What’s so hard about understanding consciousness? by PaulDavisThe1st on Friday February 04, 2022 @05:05PM (#30213977)

It's not just language. I doubt that you think it is like anything to be a rock. You do think that it is like something to be a person (or even a finger)! Those are two different states of existence, one with experiences/qualia (i.e. it is like something to be that thing) and one without. How do we explain the difference.

ps. interesting user name.

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Re:What’s so hard about understanding consciousness? by abletonlive on Friday February 04, 2022 @05:50PM (#30214546)

How can you be so sure there is no experience of being a rock? Surely it's wildly different from being a finger or a person, and perhaps, very boring from a human's perspective. I'm not sure why everybody insists you can have qualia or you can't, as if it's a binary thing. Perhaps it's a gradient. I would say there is something like being a plant, or something like being a computer program. Just because we are unable to imagine it as humans does not mean that it doesn't exist.

What makes my experience of seeing red any more special than the experience of a plant reacting to light? The fact that I can type about it on hackernews and the plant can't?

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Re:What’s so hard about understanding consciousness? by PaulDavisThe1st on Friday February 04, 2022 @06:07PM (#30214759)

Well, I'm not totally convinced it's not like anything to be a rock. But this is the generally widely-used object of "an object without qualia".

You are apparently a believer in some degree of panpyschism. That's fine. Conscious is like gravity - it's just a part of the universe and there's no explanation for it other than that it is experienced by anything with (mass, for gravity ; ??? for consciousness).

I'm not opposed to this explanation, I'm just not (yet) convinced that it's the right one.

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Re:What’s so hard about understanding consciousness? by CuriouslyC on Friday February 04, 2022 @07:30PM (#30215628)

The minerals in rocks can change in response to their environment. There has to be something that it feels like for that change to happen.

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