What does it even mean for consciousness to be an illusion? An illusion implies that someone is being fooled by consciousness, but who is the someone being fooled if there is no underlying true self?

Human brains are able to create certain mental abstractions. There's good evidence for why this would be useful (think about how much more flexible humans are than computer programs). Referring to these mental abstractions as "consciousness" or "qualia" is begging the question to a large extent.

The illusion is that these abstractions are evidence of something qualitatively more advanced than simple neurons interacting in a way that's beneficial for the organism. Which isn't unusual, we've seen the same kind of reaction when people proclaim that they couldn't have "come from monkeys," or any other scientific discovery that knocks humans off the pedestal they've placed themselves upon.

Why is it like something to be these abstractions?

Anthropically - whatever it would be like to be one of these abstractions is what we would call conscious.

A society of only p-zombies would call p-zombieness consciousness and they would be no less correct than us.

I wouldn't say it's an illusion; I would call it a perception, which I know exists because I do perceive it. In the same way I perceive external shapes and sounds, I perceive thoughts about those perceptions and thoughts about my previous thoughts. That's not better than Descartes, but I think Descartes had this part essentialy right :-)

There is an idea that consciousness may a mere epiphenomenon; as an epiphenomenon, consciousness cannot effect any change or action. But we have the feeling that we are choosing our action, so this must be an illusion, according to the idea.

There were some experiments in which subjects were asked to push a button whenever they chose. The results showed that the impulse to push the button arose before the subject was aware of having "decided" to push the button (I can't recall how they managed to detect and measure this).

At any rate, I think that's what the parent is referring to.

I think the feeling that we choose our actions, is actually not so clear a feeling. If you pay attention to how you actually make decisions, even simple ones, it is difficult to see where a "conscious being" played any part. You don't think your thoughts before you think them. They just arise out of the darkness of our subconscious minds and pop into our consciousness. We didn't consciously make them, or control them -- they just showed up. It seems that whatever we call consciousness, it is more of a leach that takes credit for what the subconscious animal does. To me, at best, the conscious mind is a journaler of thought, and perhaps is an offshoot of memory and our association engine.

>* You don't think your thoughts before you think them. They just arise out of the darkness of our subconscious minds and pop into our consciousness. We didn't consciously make them, or control them -- they just showed up. It seems that whatever we call consciousness, it is more of a leach that takes credit for what the subconscious animal does. *

Neuroscience actually confirms this :-) Brain scans show that conscious thoughts are reflections of subconscious processes doing all the work, AND that the rational mind is very good at creating post-hoc rationalizations for explaining "reasons" of why you arrived to the decisions you took. Most of what we call "reasoning" is about creating narratives to save our self-esteem.

If consciousness is an epiphenomenon, what was it that led Newton to create Calculus (for example). It's not clear to me how such a thing could come about via instinct.

It could just be the right kind of inputs. And I don't mean just education and such, but literally every perception Newton ever had over the course of his life, plus any genetic factors.

Who/what is the illusion created for? Put another way, who is observing the illusion and how are they sentient?

If "self" is really a system of multiple separate but cooperating components, the illusion - or rather, the mental abstraction - could be there for it to operate in a way that is beneficial for its survival as a whole.

Simply put, if you stop believing that you're sentient, you stop existing as a single entity that has a "self". Your existence and your belief aren't cause and effect, though - they're literally the same thing, just expressed in different words.

Calling it an "illusion" is passing the buck, because that term suggests that there's something else that's being fooled. It also sounds a bit demeaning, because it suggests that everything we experience is fake.

I find it more useful to think of "consciousness" as a special model created by a subconscious human brain. Unlike other abstract models that a subconscious brain can create, such as a rock or a tree or a cat, the subconscious brain learns to associate details of this special model with certain physical perceptions that the subconscious brain receives (specifically, the physical perceptions that correspond with its own body, as opposed to physical perceptions that correspond to things that this system would model as not being part of its own body). By "subconscious human brain", I'm thinking of something like an embodied, complex neural network that receives sensory inputs of various kinds and sends signals to physically respond in various ways, but which doesn't have anything we would call "self-awareness" outside of this special model that's associated with the bodily physical perceptions.

I think this offers a nice balance between explaining the tremendous flexibility we have in understanding ourselves (by telling ourselves and others stories that change our models of ourselves) and explaining the tremendous limitations we have (because any model of a system within that same system is going to have to be significantly less complex if that system is going to do lots of other things, too). And I like that it doesn't suggest that we "aren't real"; instead, it suggests that at any given point in time, we're living, physical entities with subconscious minds that often contain self-referential models that tend to be very relevant to our actual physical living.

1) How would processing all inputs and determining actions be less effective if everything was done subconsciously rather than consciously? Our hearts determine the correct speed and pressure to beat at all unconsciously and that is evolutionarily advantageous. Why would some information processing tasks benefit more (or at all) from consciousness?

2) Assuming "[consciousness] is an illusion created because it was evolutionarily advantageous" is true, still how do those subjective sensations of existing and being aware of things - those qualia - how do they come about? How do these alleged consciousness-enabling genes that got selected into our genome create proteins that then create this qualia for us?

Re 1) It is advantageous to predict what other humans are doing, so it makes sense for your brain to create a simulation of the world with other humans in it. To try different scenarios, it adds "you" to the simulation, figures out what the best decision is and then puts that decision into "you" (as in, you can measure that your brain makes a decision before you become consciously aware of it).

Seems like we should not stop at just what other humans are doing, as clearly attempting to predict what other animals might do or the environment around us would be just as important.

The vast vast vast majority of living creatures are not sentient, so that's unlikely to be true.

1. The vast majority of creatures don't have opposable thumbs, that doesn't mean it wasn't evolutionary advantageous for humans to have opposable thumbs.

2. We have no way of knowing any of this because we don't even have a handle on what sentience is.

One assumption people seem to be making is that sentience is a binary: either one has it or one doesn't. It's possible that there are many levels of self-awareness, some which we would recognize and some which we would not. There may be levels of sentience humans have not yet experienced, even.

For instance, ants exhibit self-aware behavior when presented with a mirror test. Does this mean ants are sentient?

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/09/1026227683/mirror-mirror-on-t...

Evidence for this claim? We simply don't know that yet. Unless you are using "sentience" to mean "human" in which case, of course they're not. However, that's part of the problem - "sentience" is not necessarily unique to humans.