[dibujante]

> My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion.

This is easily contradicted. Let's say consciousness is an epiphenomenon of computation but causality only flows one way: you "choose" to do something because your brain chose to do it and your consciousness tricked itself into thinking it was doing the choosing.

If that were the case, then the brain wouldn't be aware of consciousness. The illusion falls apart due to the fact that we are discussing consciousness right now. Consciousness must have at least some ability to communicate back to the brain.

And since evolution hates inefficiency, that means it must have a purpose.

[stormbrew]

> And since evolution hates inefficiency, that means it must have a purpose.

Evolution doesn't hate or love anything, and everything evolved does not have a purpose. Evolution is a theoretical framework developed by humans to describe some things that happen in the world they observe, not a guiding force or a god.

It's honestly kind of amazing that you appear to have ascribed consciousness to evolution in an argument for the human uniqueness of consciousness.

[elefanten]

This seems like an overly narrow reading of gp. One does not have to anthropomorphize evolution to speculate that consciousness would likely have fit this pattern of “some things that happen”

If you’re taking “hates” literally… it’s probably a misreading

[stormbrew]

I think the idea that evolution has a purpose and a direction is more than common enough that when someone says something like that things that evolve never lack a purpose, they've gone wrong in their understanding of evolution, even if only in subtle ways they may not be aware of themselves.

Anyways, I think the juxtaposition is funny no matter how seriously they meant it. We all want to believe that consciousness is something that can be easily defined and yet our use of aspects of it is extremely fuzzy.

[dibujante]

Um, no, the idea that evolution has a telos is dumb. Anthropomorphization is a useful short-hand. Nature has no opinions about a vacuum. Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literal_and_figurative_languag...

[mettamage]

> you "choose" to do something because your brain chose to do it and your consciousness tricked itself into thinking it was doing the choosing.

This happens most of the time actually. The most interesting experiment really highlighting specifically that it happens is in split brain patients. But in common day experiences, I believe that all habits fall under this and basically anything that our default mode network is directing for us.

When I was in a meditation retreat what I noticed is that I have all kinds of feelings and thoughts arising that were not arising because I chose them to arise, instead they were arising on their own. When you really observe yourself you see that happening. In that sense, the beginning of a thought and feeling has a very distinct quality that dreams have as well which is they are "passed down from up on high" (metaphorically speaking). What I get to decide is whether I choose to follow that feeling/train of thought, but the more I looked into it, the more I realized that my choice is very limited in that as well. As my whether I'd follow a feeling/thought or not was actually based on other feelings and thoughts. In any case, the more I observed myself, the more I came to the conclusion that I have no free will, there is no "me" that does the choosing. It's all feelings/thoughts that arise that I have nothing to do with. I only have freedom of choice.

And then I got to normal life, and lived my life as normal. It did help me to have more sympathy for other people.

So now I wonder how you experience yourself if you'd go to a 10 day silent/meditation retreat ;-)

[stevenhuang]

You wrongly assume the output of such "computation" cannot itself be an input to the computation. Which, if you know anything about the brain, we know certainly happens by virtue of watching synapses fire.

See also simplified models like recurrent neural networks for example.