[laratied]

You could say the exact same thing about the "soul".

I just do not understand why we can't take the idea that consciousness doesn't exist seriously. The word practically has no meaning.

"We know consciousness exists because we are conscious" is as circular reasoning as it gets.

It is so strange to me that we can't even be bothered to explore if this question is the 21st century version of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

There has to be so many things that we currently believe to be true that are utter nonsense. When we believe something exists but we can't even define what the word means that is probably a good place to look for nonsense.

[IIAOPSW]

I think there's a legit line of inquiry in trying to develop a "top down" picture of reality rather than "bottom up". Eg instead of taking the physical laws and objects as fundamental and ourselves as something that can be constructed within it, what if we instead recognize that whatever argument you make is in fact made to convince myself and others, and therefore the existence of myself and other conscious entities is an irrefutable axiom of the argumentation based reasoning we use.

Given just conversational conscious entities and the words they pass around as the only a priori existent things, can we use these as tools to construct a picture of the familiar physical sort of reality. In other words, failing constructing consciousness from the bottom up, can we construct our picture of the physical from the top down?

[simonh]

I think that is in fact what we do.

I think it is possible to build up a rational case for an objective universe starting with just perception. Firstly if the only thing that exists is conscious awareness, where does the informational content of the world you perceive come from? It doesn't come from your awareness, because you are not aware of it until you perceive it. You can say it comes from the subconscious, but the subconscious is not part of your conscious awareness. It's external to it, in the same way that your hand is external to your conscious awareness. There has to be an origin for perceptions that is external to conscious awareness of those perceptions.

From there we observe that these perceptions are of a consistent and persistent form, so it’s rational to conclude that they have an origin in a consistent and persistent source. From there, and taking into account our ability to test our perceptions through action, we can build up knowledge about the world of our experiences.

As for trusting logic and rationality, does it give consistent and useful results? Test it and see if it continues to work reliably over time. If applying logic provides random, contradictory or unreliable results that’s a problem, but maybe you can correct that by modifying how you reason about things and trying again. That’s learning. So I think we do have the cognitive tools we need to build up a robust account of reality starting from base perception.

We didn’t start off human society and civilisation with scientific laws as our founding axioms. We inferred them from sense data, including the process of physically testing our ideas in the world.

[mysecretaccount]

One of the best comments I have read on this site.

[shrimp_emoji]

It's such a cursed term that the thing some people mean by it does exist, like the ability to sense things around you, communicate on a human level, and have an operant short term memory of at least 5 minutes.

When I see someone use "consciousness", I'm assuming they mean something grander akin to a soul, like a special, immutable self that they feel like they possess, which I think is just embellishing an illusion the mind creates for itself. Some people do mean it that way, but some not.

It should be scrapped from our vocabulary since it just scrambles communication.

[uoaei]

This is a fundamentally different situation, because it's very possible that consciousness is the only thing that we can or will ever experience directly. I agree that things like UFOs cannot be explained in that way, because those experiences are products of our sense-making, but consciousness is the act of sense-making itself which is hard to deny.

[simonh]

I don’t buy this at all. We have experiences. It’s the one brute fact we are sure of, but it’s enough to build from that a coherent materialist model of the world that is consistent and testable. Everything we think and know is built up from the foundation of our conscious experiences though.

I’m no solipsist, I’m a thoroughgoing materialist, but if we don’t accept the evidential nature of our conscious experiences as being real phenomena, we have nothing.

[goatlover]

You could just reference the philosophical literature. Qualia is the technical term for sensations of color, sound, smell, taste, tactile sensations and any other bodily sensation. It's very strange for someone to talk about consciousness not existing. You don't experience color, sound or pain? What about inner dialog, imagination or dreams?

The soul has nothing to do with this in the modern philosophical debate.

[kelseyfrog]

Tend to agree. Consciousness is a social fact evidenced by it's plurality of grounding, single cultural origin, and memetic propagation. The idea itself is barely 500 years old. If it is a fundamental aspect of the human experience, why wouldn't it have origins stretching back to prehistory?

[simonh]

We have cultural artefacts of people reporting first person experiences going back as long as we have writing, and longer from oral traditions. These are in the form of narratives, poetry, songs, etc. What is the story of Narcissus about if not the immediate visceral stimulation of visual experience?

We can also infer it. I find it hard to see why cultures would produce representative art if they had no experience of seeing it. In a world without first person experience it’s hard for me to imagine what function representational art would have.

[kelseyfrog]

At the same time, we have philologists who agree that Descartes was the first to use "conscientia" in a way that doesn't match the historical use of conscientia and instead matches our use of the word "consciousness" and John Locke was the first to use of the word "consciousness" in the same way we use it today.

Additionally we can point to Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind as a theory that doesn't assume a historical consciousness (or at least in the same what).

Who's right then?

[simonh]

So it seems like the argument is that consciousness didn’t exist because we didn’t have a word for it and the guy wrote a book and built a career with that as a premise.

Honestly, can I even be bothered? Oh, alright then, just for fun.

Yes I know I simplify above, but honestly not by all that much. There’s a history of the development of styles of literature. Sure. But that doesn’t mean the world, or people, changed because ways of describing or creating narratives about them changed.

At the root of this seems to be the idea that we can’t have a thing such a consciousness without the idea of the thing, and other examples given in evidence are baseball and money. This is flat out wrong.

Nobody sits down with a blank piece of paper and invents a new ball game from scratch. All the ball games we have were developed by playing with balls. You just have done this. A bunch of kids get together and start messing with a ball, they appropriate objects in their environment into the game such as sticks and posts and such, make up rules as they go. Over time things happen in the game they didn’t expect and they invent new rules to cover those circumstances. Eventually they have a great game they love, they give it a name and then free inventing the game they write down the rules.

It’s the same with money, it started off as tokens representing goods, then they established the lowest value object as the basic rate of exchange such as a chicken or a bag of grain, then they work out exchange rates between different tokens such as 5 chickens equals one sheep, then they mark the tokens with symbols, etc, etc. Eventually you get money. Nobody looked at a market and deduced you know what, we need to invent money. The concept emerges from the practice.

My wife has Aphantasia, which means she doesn’t subvocalise. She doesn’t hear an inner voice when she reads, and can’t imagine what that’s like. She also cannot imagine visual images, yet she reports the same first person experience the rest of us have. So the idea that language creates consciousness seems to fail right there. We also have reports from people that don’t learn language until late in childhood of first person conscious experience from before they learned language.

So I’m sorry, it’s bunk. There never was any actual evidence for it, the chain of reasoning inserts conclusions that don’t follow from its arguments, and there’s clear evidence that contradicts its assumptions.

[kelseyfrog]

There's also things that don't exist until people have words for them, where the very act of speaking it brings about its existence. It seems equally likely that consciousness wouldn't have been self-evident without someone being primed to perceive it as a category.

[simonh]

Can you give an example?

Not being self-evident isn't at all the same thing as not existing. They're not even in the same category.