[mo_42]

> I know exactly what consciousness is based on my experience with it, even though I could not possibly give a comprehensive account of everything consciousness entails.

Not sure if personal experiences count. Generally, we laugh at people who talk about esoteric experiences.

So a simple explanation could be that consciousness is an illusion?

Or put differently, is there any phenomenon that needs the assumption of consciousness?

The way I experience myself could be just the history of experiences. So there is something that the brain can refer to.

[ARandomerDude]

> So a simple explanation could be that consciousness is an illusion?

Doesn't having an illusion presuppose consciousness?

[nathan_compton]

What perceives the illusion?

[visarga]

So "the illusion" is like a GPT or StableDiffusion model making stuff up based on conditioning. Nothing mysterious, we have AI that can do that. The same simulator predicts not just how the world will evolve, but also actions and their estimated rewards. It's an imagination based planning system.

Bringing all perceptions together into the simulation, integrating them into the same reference system, and using them to imagine, plan, act and learn - that could be consciousness.

[nathan_compton]

Yes, but why would such a system experience anything? I'm a died in the wool monist materialist but I can acknowledge that there is something tricky (at the very least) going on here.

[visarga]

We create representations from our sensorial data and values from our reward signals. We are part of a larger system and our actions are filtered and rewarded by the environment. We feed on this system to learn, basically we train on it.