What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

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?

[ Parent | on HN ]

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]