I’ll start by acknowledging that this isn’t my idea, credit to Sam Harris. I also don’t know if this is even controversial, but I figured this would be a better place to post than in Showerthoughts.
By consciousness, I mean the subjective experience of what it feels like to be. As philosopher Thomas Nagel put it:
‘An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.’
It’s at least conceivable that things like free will, the self, or even the entire universe could be an illusion. For all we know, we could be living in a simulation and nothing might be real. Even if you don’t believe that, there’s still a greater-than-zero chance you could be wrong. However, this doesn’t apply to consciousness itself. Even if everything is just a hallucination, it remains an undeniable fact that it feels like something to hallucinate. To claim that consciousness could be an illusion is a self-contradictory statement as consciousness is where illusions appear.
“Credit to Sam Harris”
For something that’s a well known saying by Rene Descartes?
“Cogito ergo sum” is exactly “consciousness is the only thing that can’t be an illusion”
Nihil sub sole novum, as it says in the Bible.
(There is nothing new under the sun)
So your defense of attributing inventions to people who didn’t invent them is “well here’s a nice passage from the bible, no-one really invents anything anyway”.
No they do. They really, really do. Descartes ideas were relatively new.
It was a bit different in say 2000bc or something when there literally wasn’t anything new under the sun, as dozens if not more generations would go by without any change in technology or philosophy.
It’s very different by the 1600’s, as you should know with that username.
“Something exists. Beyond that I dunno.” Somebody give that man some money.
Consciousness is as a convenient abstraction to explain the behaviour of human beings, but it doesn’t really refer to anything real. As such, I think that the claim “consciousness is not an illusion” is technically correct but misleading, since it implies that consciousness exists.
Nagel’s quote is extremely vague, since that ontological “to be” that he uses doesn’t really mean anything.
Just the two cents of some materialistic nobody.
Consciousness as defined by Nagel absolutely exists. If one want’s to define it differently then that’s fair but it’s not really an argument against the statement made in the title anymore then.
I’m not changing definitions. I’m stating that what he defined does not exist.
To go a bit deeper: regardless of whatever that “to be” is supposed to mean, the “subjective experience of what it feels like to be” is still an experience. And experiences do not exist in the physical = real = material sense; they’re solely abstractions. Like valence holes, software, or so many other things that are not real but convenient to explain the behaviour of real things.
The same applies to concepts like “mind”, “soul”, “spirit” and similar.
[No idea on why people are downvoting your comment though.]
But the point is not the ‘to be’ part but the ‘feels like’. It’s quite undeniable that what ever this existence is feels like something. It feels like something to be me, it feels like something to be you, it probably feels like something to be a cat but it likely doesn’t feel like anything to be a rock. General anesthesia doesn’t feel like anything. It cannot be experienced. Consciousness is the ability to have experiences.
To claim that consciousness could be an illusion is a self-contradictory statement as consciousness is where illusions appear.
This sounds a lot like the “did the chicken come before the egg or the other way around” God is defined as the progenitor of existence, but if something preceded or even paralleled God before existence, then that would have to be the real God instead, based on the ontological definition. That was confusing, but I only mention it because if you could have a “consciousness” which perceives another consciousness as illusory, (like one I could download into a machine) then your own “awareness” is just as relatively illusory as the first one.
Like, the universe comes from God, and some would say that you can’t have one without the other. And our perception of the world stems from a consciousness, and some would say you can’t have one without the other. I just wanted to talk about the problems that arise when you form a recursive pattern with these foundational ideas. What is really behind consciousness? Can consciousness lie to you? Of course. Should you stop trusting your consciousness? Not completely, you would become a vegetable. Bed sores hurt.
I’m just kinda rambling, but thank you for posting this stimulating topic. This consciousness appreciates it.
Well the idea of panpsychism suggests that consciousness is a fundamental part of the universe. That it’s just a property of matter. It doesn’t exactly argue, that it feels like something to be a rock, but that consciousness still lies even in rocks on a some level.
I don’t exactly have an argument against that theory either, but it doesn’t necessarily challenge the fact of individual human consciousness. It really does feel like something to be me. Maybe my consciousness is just a slice of something greater, but the window I experience it thru is very real. For all we know, that “something which existed before God” could just as well be the person running the simulation. Then again something probably existed before that too, and so on…
cogito, ergo sum
This is the only absolute truth, for each of us. I may be a brain in a vat being fed false stimuli. I may be in a grand computer simulation. I may be a resident of Plato’s Cave. Everything I believe or guess about the world around me may be an illusion. But I do know that I think, and therefore, in some sense, I am.
The part I take issue with this is the “I” or “self”. That, I argue is an illusion. There is no centre to consciousness. There’s just consciousness. The correct saying would be “thinking is occuring”
The part I take issue with this is the “I” or “self”.
Well learn Latin then. It just translates poorly into English.
A more literal translation of “Cogito ergo sum” would be “consciousness, thus, existence”
If the universe is a simulation then conciousness could be considered an illusion to those outside the simulation. From an internal perspective it wouldnt be an illusion as it’s the only thing that we experience.
However we have trouble even defining what counciousness is (an oversimplified quote from a philosopher doesn’t cover it) so it seems pointless to make such speculative black and white statements about it.
Consciousness is entirely subjective experience so other people’s perspective on it seems quite irrelevant.
What’s oversimplified about the definition I laid out?
Yes my point was that if there was a hypothetical being outside our universe looking in they could correctly say that our consciousness is an illusion from their subjective experience.
It’s an oversimplification because that is not the scientifically accepted definition of consciousness. It is currently undefined and seems to be an emergent property from the brain, the complex object known to us.
It feels like something to be. That’s an undeniable fact. Even if there’s a creator outside our universe that programmed us and our consciousness it still feels like something to be from my subjective point of view. That’s why consciousness under this definition cannot be an illusion. You’re free to disagree with the definition of it that I laid out but then you’re talking about a different thing and thus not arguing against the point I made.
Ok, I agree it can’t be an illusion the way you define it, I don’t think that would be an unpopular opinion.
I also maintain that it cannot be defined the way you define it.
You’re also not offering a definition you like better. This is quite widely accepted definition among the people thinking about this stuff. If I were to leave it undefined it would be impossible to argue against the point I’m making because there wouldn’t be certainty that we’re even talking about the same thing.
I couldn’t claim to have a definition as the origins of consciousness are still unknown to science and not formally defined.
However your definition is definitely not the widely accepted one. It doesn’t even offer a proper definition, all it does is push the unknowns to “what it is like to be that organism”.
Who defines what it is to “be” something? What is the smallest unit of “being”? Are we saying that consciousness is an inherent property of organisms or could it be recreated on a computer?
Consciousness is the fact that it feels like something to be. It’s the feels like part that’s relevant here. Not the to be part. It’s the subjective quality of experience. It describes a phenomenom in the real world, doesn’t explain it. There is no evidence of consciousness in the world except for the fact that you can experience it yourself. It’s entirely subjective.
