[jstanley]

Consciousness is the only thing that can not possibly be an illusion.

Whenever this comes up I have to wonder if half the people are secretly p-zombies and actually genuinely aren't sure whether consciousness is an illusion because they've never experienced it? I know that's not a very charitable take but I just can't see how any conscious being could imagine that consciousness could be an illusion!

Consciousness isn't the illusion, consciousness is the audience!

[pcthrowaway]

The person above meant "the persistence of consciousness"

Yes, we are conscious (or at least I am, I'm assuming y'all are too).

But consciousness isn't static. My consciousness today is not my consciousness of 5 years ago.

[sage92]

Begs the question: by what metric are you using to track the change/staticity?

I don’t see how one can concretely come to the conclusion of whether it changes or stays the same, when the presence of consciousness itself is a prerequisite of making that very claim

[pcthrowaway]

Well if you believe there's something magical about consciousness I could see why you'd believe the same person's consciousness at different points in time is the same consciousness.

If you believe consciousness is a function of sentience and self-awareness, and presumably that AI can one day be conscious (not saying it is right now), then I don't see how you can believe consciousness is persistent.

If the AI is copied/moved to a different server, is it the same consciousness? Or in Star Trek when you get beamed up are you the same consciousness?

[sage92]

Safe to say you tend to lean towards your second presentation of consciousness.

I tend to lean towards the idea that conscious is akin to a field in the sense of an electron field - that what we can measure are simply “excitations” of a more subtle field. Not a perfect metaphor, but it’s the closest thing to what matches my meditative experiences. IMO, it’s illogical for me to let another subjective being define what my substrate is, so I primarily rely on meditation and then supplement with objective observations.

All in all it really depends on what you define as consciousness. The issue that I have with most “objective” interpretations of consciousness is that we can only measure the excitations of this mysterious “life” thing is. If there is more to us than can be measured, e.g, that there are first person experiences that can be felt subjectively but not measured objectively, then any objective measure of consciousness will likely be limited. Consciousness seems from my pov to be the Achilles heal of the axiomatic assumptions of our scientific paradigm (at least in the west)

In response to your question, it depends on your definition of consciousness. Is neural activity the source of consciousness, or is neural activity the result of consciousness? How can we know for sure which?

[jhanschoo]

The me who is engrossed in a conversation with a peer over dinner at night focusing on the topic at hand surely is a different consciousness as the me fighting to stay awake just after lunch. They think and emotionally experience very different things.

[richardw]

People run on autopilot unless we put in effort to focus on the current moment. Almost everyone demonstrates bad habits that show how little conscious awareness and control we have. LLM’s can replicate a lot of our activities, so the realm of “consciousness” is in the things that the AI can’t do by simply repackaging and regurgitating content back at us. What we can claim as conscious special sauce has grown smaller over the last 15 years.

Argument 2:

Could we design a machine that is absolutely sure it’s conscious, but is not? If so, what differentiates us from it? Open question, I’m not sure. But I’d be surprised if we can be permanently sure.

[bee_rider]

Argument 2 seems more like a thought-experiment or a question than an argument. (Unless maybe I missed the point?)

Anyway, isn’t a machine that “is absolutely sure” (of anything at all) having subjective experience (I think is the word, not a brainologist) by definition anyway?

We could clearly design a machine that asserts that it is self aware very strenuously

    printf(“I *am* experiencing existence!”); 

But whether or not it actually sure of anything or experiencing at all is the question in the first place.

[richardw]

How do you know you’re not an automaton that thinks it’s conscious?

Not feel. Not think. Not have a strong vibe. Proof.

I don’t have to prove anything here, because I’m not the one making an assertion. My thought experiment demonstrates a situation where an entity thinks it’s conscious but isn’t. Humans think we’re conscious but can’t prove it.

[jstanley]

This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about.

How can you be remotely unsure about whether you are conscious? It is inconceivable to me that you could be conscious and unaware of it. It's an oxymoron.

Of course you can be unsure about whether others are conscious. But if you are conscious then you know that you are.

Do you experience things at all? Or are you a soulless machine that takes inputs and gives outputs and doesn't experience anything on the inside?

If the former, you're conscious and you know it.

[richardw]

We “experience” consciousness in the same way we experience hard objects that are actually made of mostly space. It feels right but it’s impossible to say that it’s the truth.

There are a lot of smart people who are less sure that our perceptions reflect reality. Free will, time, consciousness, space all feel very real. But when you interrogate them enough, those fall away. Go fast enough and your time slows down. Go as fast as a photon and time and distance disappear entirely. Yet we’re sure they’re real. At one point we absolutely knew the sun revolved around us. We could see it doing that daily.

One smart person on free will below. There are so many others. There’s certainly no consensus that “our experience = how things are”.

https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-illusion-of-free-will

The point is that our perception doesn’t provably equal “truth”. To make absolute statements you need to be a lot more sure and be more correct than all the smart people who say “not sure yet”.

[jstanley]

> The point is that our perception doesn’t provably equal “truth”.

That's fine, but that you have experiences at all proves that you have experiences.

I'm not saying nothing can be an illusion! I'm saying that consciousness specifically can't be an illusion, because if it was an illusion you wouldn't be experiencing anything at all.

[unparagoned]

You mentioned smart people and I wondered who you were talking about. Then you said Sam Harris who has a reputation for being a clueless idiot in philosophy circles.

Most philosophers are compatibilists, since that’s a good strong philosophical position. Harris is just saying libertarian free will doesn’t exist, but that’s irrelevant since that’s not what people really mean by the term.

[bee_rider]

I think we’ve skipped defining terms, which makes it hard to work out exactly what your thought experiment is trying to say.

What does it mean to be conscious? I (layman, this is a well-explored space so maybe somebody more informed will come along with a better definition) would define a conscious being as one which has subjective experiences, that is, one which has has the sensation of thinking. Therefore I know I am a conscious being by definition.

I mean this is just “I think, therefore I am.”

It is definitely possible that I’m an artificial being programmed to have first person subjective experience. I can confirm, if so, to my creators that their experiment was successful. But, I can’t offer any proof, and of course they would be totally reasonable to assume I am lying.

In your thought experiment, you say an entity that thinks it is conscious, but isn’t. By my definition of consciousness, that is impossible, because thinking things is definitionally a characteristic of conscious beings. It is fine if you want to use a different definition of consciousness or thinking, I just assumed and later supplied (my bad, I also should have defined in the beginning) what I thought were typical definitions.

[deepsun]

"Blindsight" by Peter Watts is exactly about that.

[k__]

"The case against reality" is also about that.

But as far as I know, not many scientists think this is a reasonable idea.

[scoofy]

Ultimately it doesn’t matter if it’s reasonable. If it were true, life would be absurd. So, philosophically, we can assume it’s untrue because the alternative means being wrong about it doesn’t matter.

[scoofy]

> Consciousness is the only thing that can not possibly be an illusion.

It can be. Suppose consciousness is a series of infinitesimal snapshots, where existence flickers for a moment and then disappears, with a new existence birthed in the next moment. Like a motion picture, at each moment we do not have a sensible version of consciousness, merely a burst of sensation, but in aggregate, as a film, consciousness springs from nothing.

[Barrin92]

> as a film, consciousness springs from nothing.

But it doesn't. Because the film depends on the screen and the projector. This was one of Kant's central points, although he used the fancy term "transcendental unity of apperception". To even experience a set of images as disjointed, to see individual parts as relating to each other there has to be a unified experience judging them as disjointed against, the "thinking I". Without the observer already implicit in the thought experiment about images constituting a film, there is no "film" because nothing in it would have the ability to even conceive of itself as such. Hindus have a very elegant term for this "witness-consciousness" (Atman), importantly like in Kant distinct from ego and mind, not experience but a formal condition for experience. David Bentley Hart also has a great section about this in his recent book:

"Every composite thing, he acknowledges, is an aggregate of several other things, and all its actions are aggregations of diverse actions and accident. [...] If it’s the composite thing that’s doing the thinking, then each part of the composite possesses only a part of the thought, and only in the aggregate is there a complete thought—but then who or what is having that thought? Where does that thought as a unity occur? Can it be just another part of the brain, with its own diverse parts and its own necessary inner coordinating facility? But then that too is made up of partially competent ..."

[Turskarama]

That's just an implementation detail, in aggregate the result is still consciousness. It's like saying animation isn't real because it's just a sequence of still images.

[scoofy]

The implementation matters.

[theendisney]

There could be something that [locally] rolls back time or creates brances to error correct conciousness.

[scoofy]

I'm not arguing that consciousness is and illusion. I'm only arguing that it is possible that it could be an illusion. It's probably not, and if it were, it wouldn't matter. I'm just saying it's possible.

[theendisney]

I doubt it makes a difference. If it exists it is real regardless of implementation.

It can only be considered fake if it is a replication of something else and is inferior.

[wild_egg]

Very similar to how LLMs work but at much higher frequency

[liamwire]

we’re all just CI/CD pipelines

[wat10000]

I agree. It has a great parallel to the debate over mental imagery. There was a big debate over whether it’s real, with one group saying of course it’s real, and the other saying it’s obviously just a metaphor. Turns out some people can visualize stuff and some can’t. Maybe some people are conscious and some aren’t. It would explain why so many people argue weird things about consciousness.