[madeofmeat]

"Consciousness is an illusion"

I take the word "illusion" to mean, some type of experience which misleads one about reality. And "consciousness" to mean, the experience of having experiences.

So I parse this claim as something like, "People both do not have conscious experiences, and also do continuously have a particular type of conscious experience: a misleading experience which leads them to believe they have conscious experiences".

Yet I see this claim made seriously and often. What am I missing?

[HarHarVeryFunny]

> Consciousness is an illusion

It's just like the related "Free will is an illusion".

With "illusion" just referring to something that appears to be one thing, when it is in fact something else.

In the case of free will - we all feel as if we have it, that our future actions are under "our" control, but if we assume or brains and muscles are subject to the laws of physics then this can't be correct. We're just a meat machine. We can watch the decision making in progress and easily believe that some mysterious actor "me" is the one doing it, but in reality the meat machine is doing everything, including the self-observation, and the sense of self is just as illusory/misleading as the sense of free will.

Consciousness, rather closely connected to sense of self, can be described as illusory since it makes us feel that "being" or "experiencing" are something fundamental, some aspect of being "alive" that is distinct from the computational machinery of our brain that is otherwise doing all the perception, cognition, emoting, etc. But, again, the meat machine argument tells us this must be wrong, so it's reasonable to call consciousness an illusion - not what it seems to be, even if there is some real self-observational computation behind it ... it does exist, but it's not magic.

A useful thought experiment for anyone who believes that a sufficiently brain-like machine wouldn't experience qualia - e.g. the feeling of seeing something - is to try to pinpoint exactly what aspect of the feeling the machine would be missing? The expansive sense of color/vision as a spatial quality perhaps? The grass-like freshness of new leaves on a tree blowing in the breeze, perhaps? ...

[nobody9999]

I look at it a little differently.

It's not that consciousness is illusory. Rather, consciousness is synthesis.

A synthesis of sensory inputs as interpreted by multiple, sometimes competing, semi-independent systems combined with stored patterns based on previous subjective "experience", creating a narrative about you and the world.

That narrative is our subjective experience, our "consciousness."

[mr_toad]

The illusion is of conscious volition; that consciousness is an atomic unit in charge of your actions.

The brain is in control. Whether the conscious ‘mind’ has any control at all is debatable.

[chongli]

That's conflating consciousness with free will. I didn't see anyone in this discussion make the claim that consciousness necessarily implies free will. These are conceptually separate phenomena. It is at that point that the claim "consciousness is an illusion" requires further explanation to avoid the trap of circular reasoning.

[madeofmeat]

Sure, the view that volition is an illusion is not self-contradictory. And I get that this is a very useful view, because it lets us set aside "conscious inner experiences" and just analyze the mind as a deterministic machine with inputs and outputs. This lets us expect to eventually understand the mind/brain fully using only the physics and computing tools we already have.

Now it leaves conscious experience itself as an unexplained phenomenon, but maybe that will never become important.

[red75prime]

> The brain is in control.

The brain is always in control. When you are awake, when you are sleeping, when you are under general anesthesia, when you are sleepwalking, when you are blackout drunk, and so on.

It's a trivial statement, which doesn't say anything about why some of these states aren't like the others. And there's a strange coincidence: when the brain creates that "illusion of control", your body behaves differently than when it doesn't.