Re:Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?
by bowsamic on Wednesday July 27, 2022 @11:36AM
(#32251763)
I think consciousness is the more fundamental thing, because it’s the only thing I ever have experience of, and that everything else arises from that (including the physical world). To me that’s the simplest explanation
Taking a step further, I think neither consciousness nor physical reality really exists, it’s all emptiness (see Heart sutra)
Re:Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?
by simonh on Wednesday July 27, 2022 @07:28PM
(#32258436)
I don’t see how that’s a simple explanation. We know we lose consciousness, totally, on a regular basis yet when we awake the world is still there. It’s always consistent and doesn’t radically change as our consciousness changes. We can set devices to record activity in the world while we are unconscious, and their recordings seem consistent. The simplest explanation seems to be that the world is real and persistent, but our consciousness is transient.
If the world arises from consciousness, we would expect that changes in conscious states would persistently alter consensus reality. But we never see that happen.
I prefer not to use the 'illusion' terminology because I think it's misleading. We do have a real experience of consciousness, just not always. For me Buddhism and panpsychism, and the idea of consciousness as being fundamental is a hierarchy inversion error.
If consciousness is a computation or an emergent phenomenon of brain activity processing information, then we are a kind of information system. It doesn't therefore follow that all information systems are in some way conscious. That's like saying horses are all animals, therefore in some way animals are all horses. Yes we have some things in common with all information processing systems, so we have some of the same features like persistent memory and such because we're members of the same conceptual category, but that doesn't make us the same thing.