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So it was brought up a tiny bit in the hocus pocus thread and after reading Blindsight by Peter Watts I wanted to make a thread on this topic.
Feel free to bring dualism if you think you can make a good argument for it but I think it's better if we focus on the material possible explanations for it.
I'm no expert but from what I gathered there seem to be two main groups of theories:
That's certainly a possibility - conscience as a side effect of something else (much like octagonal beehives) that might or might not have been selected for evolutionarily.
What is the mind? Never matter. What is matter? Never mind.
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What is the conscious self, after all? A short-term cache; a scratch pad; the little post-it note used to remind you to pick up a dozen eggs on the way home from work. The damn thing is barely big enough to hold a telephone number, for chrissakes; some folks claim that the bandwidth of conscious experience is a measly 20 bits/sec.
I think the question is meaningless until we get some proper definitions going, which given our current understanding of the mind/brain is impossible.
Honestly I think conciseness is largely an illusion- that a lot of what feels like a conscious decision is really a series of automatic processes.
The concept of illusion is a product of our consciousness though.
...any words we use to discuss consciousness, including consciousness itself, are a product of consciousness.
I'm saying that by what an illusion is, it can't exist outside of our perception which seems to be what you were suggesting. An automatic process can't create an illusion of consciousness so to speak, since it suggests unreality.
I love me some Peter Watts. Also worth mentioning that the entirety of Blindsight is on the internet for free, by the author himself right here. So it's not like it's ILLEGAL FILES or anything.
I look forward to the slow erosion of all supernatural explanations for consciousness over the next 20 years as brain scanning technology gets better and better. Gonna be an interesting few decades.
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Honestly I think conciseness is largely an illusion- that a lot of what feels like a conscious decision is really a series of automatic processes.
...any words we use to discuss consciousness, including consciousness itself, are a product of consciousness.
Read this, I say.
I look forward to the slow erosion of all supernatural explanations for consciousness over the next 20 years as brain scanning technology gets better and better. Gonna be an interesting few decades.