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Consciousness - the mystery continues!

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It has been said that the brain is the most complex device known to man and there still remains many unsolved mysteries. And among them is the subject of consciousness which by the way is still up for debate even among neuroscientists! So, what exactly is consciousness, why do we have it, how does it work, etc? Your thoughts?






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  • MayCaesarMayCaesar 5970 Pts   -  
    Consciousness could very well be an illusion. Now, I realise that this is not really an answer, as every illusion, in turn, has to have an explanation. However, there might be no explanation possible in this particular case.

    Just like the question of "why" does not always have a finite answer (for example, the question "Why do electrons repel each other?" can be answered in many different theoretical ways, however there is no fundamental reason underlying all these explanations that can be ever found, as Feynman pointed out in one of his amazing interviews), the question of "how" also might not be always answerable. Consciousness fundamentally, as far as we know, is not a subject to scientific method, and any given person only has their own consciousness to experiment with, resulting in necessarily biased, incomplete and hardly reproducible experimental results.

    So what I mean when I say that consciousness might be an illusion is this: for all scientific purposes, it may be reasonable to assume that consciousness is not a physical entity, and that each of us merely relives some abstract experiences and tries to categorise them in easily understandable terms, while having no real control over the process. We are simply "riding" perspectives of individual intelligent creatures, with no impact on the physical reality around us.

    Consider a video game consisting of multiple virtual creatures. At any point you can get into a first person view of each of those creatures and experience the world from their point of view - however, in the game itself nothing changes as a result of your intrusion, and, in fact, the creature itself is not aware of anything that is happening around it and simply follows its programming. You are just looking at what happens to it, and that is what consciousness is. We trick ourselves into thinking that we have some degree of control over the process, but that is an illusion: everything that we do is fundamentally caused by the chemical reactions in our bodies, over which we have no control.

    An interesting question in this regard I have wondered about since my early childhood is this: do other people have consciousness, or is it only me that does? Even when other people say that they have consciousness, there is absolutely no scientific way to verify it; I cannot "jump" into their consciousness and see the world as they see it. What if all other people are essentially biological robots with no awareness, and it is only my perspective that makes them look like conscious creatures?
    Perhaps the world is a bit like a simulation, where you can hop into a creature's consciousness and live through its experiences, but all other creatures around you are purely simulated entities that have no consciousness of their own. Solipsism gains an entire new meaning under this hypothesis.

    But perhaps all of this is wrong, and consciousness actually has a physical explanation to it. It is a bit hard to imagine what it could possibly be, but I can think of a few vague explanations that could very well be found by science eventually.

  • I think that consciousness is if not completely, then definately close to 100% probability of it being physical. We just don't know a great deal about it yet.



  • PlaffelvohfenPlaffelvohfen 3985 Pts   -  
    I think of consciousness as a process, a complex one obviously, but still just a process like say combustion. And it was maybe unavoidable, some sort of evolutionary imperative or necessary consequence of "life", in the sense that once micro-organisms appear in a galaxy, consciousness will eventually follow at some point...

    I agree with @MayCaesar that it's a kind of illusion too. We actually experience life consciously with a delay, we're always milliseconds behind the present, we technically can only be conscious of the past, in many ways we are indeed seeing a movie being projected and all we can do is watch... We are very bad data collection and data processing machines, our senses (all of them) are very inaccurate and easily fooled... 
    MayCaesarZeusAres42
    " Adversus absurdum, contumaciter ac ridens! "
  • I think of consciousness as a process, a complex one obviously, but still just a process like say combustion. And it was maybe unavoidable, some sort of evolutionary imperative or necessary consequence of "life", in the sense that once micro-organisms appear in a galaxy, consciousness will eventually follow at some point...

    I agree with @MayCaesar that it's a kind of illusion too. We actually experience life consciously with a delay, we're always milliseconds behind the present, we technically can only be conscious of the past, in many ways we are indeed seeing a movie being projected and all we can do is watch... We are very bad data collection and data processing machines, our senses (all of them) are very inaccurate and easily fooled... 

    This reminded me somewhat of a Book I once read by Neuroscientist David Eagleman - "The Brain: The story of you." https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brain-Story-You-David-Eagleman/dp/1101870532

    Also interesting is that we don't remember things like we're some kind of recorder. But there's so much more than as well. @Plaffelvohfen
    MayCaesar



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