[krzat]

The assumption that neuron activity == consciousness is incorrect.

A lot of neurons in our brain are doing visual processing. How much of it is conscious?

Writing this comment, I have very little insight into how I am able to create this sentence and then read it. Makes me wonder what's the point of being conscious anyway.

[moh_maya]

Blindsight, by Peter Watts, is a good, sci-fi fiction meditation on the pitfalls / dubious value of consciousness / self awareness.. if you haven’t read it, I would recommend it - it’s a dense, perhaps ‘dry’ read for some - but very rewarding nonetheless IMO.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/y19ck8/i_finally_r...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/1fze6sx/blindsight...

[virgil_disgr4ce]

Seconding this. I recommend Blindsight whenever the subject of consciousness—specifically lack thereof—comes up. It basically asks the question "What would it mean for there to be an intelligent species that was not conscious?"

Even more relevant now with LLMs (not that they're an "intelligent species." But a lot of people seem to think they are)

[strogonoff]

The extended mind theory takes the “neuronal activity is not the mind” (which seems trivially true to me) slightly further: not only it is not happening merely in the brain, it might not even be technically limited to our bodies and extends into the surrounding physical world.

So far whenever I read summaries about it I can’t say EMT exactly “clicks” with me, though I would at least lean towards our consciousness necessarily involving/extending to people in our lives whom we are in contact with.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_mind_thesis

[anthk]

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365412617_Polyatomi...

Btw, from the threads's article, the personality change over transplant it's literally an episode from The Simpsons, but you, know, creators are actually PhD people, as it shows off under Futurama.

[NuclearPM]

Trivially true? Why?

[strogonoff]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#...

[ASalazarMX]

How do we know if the visual cortex isn't conscious? There are conscious parts of our brain that we aren't aware of, just as we are alive, but we can't be aware of how all our cells are also alive.

I think quantifying consciousness is a problem we are absurdly far from solving yet. Most we are able to do is philosophize about it.

[virgil_disgr4ce]

You're doing that "we just don't understand the brain" thing that everyone apparently loves doing, I guess because it makes them sound smart? Asking questions like "How do we know if the visual cortex isn't conscious" is not the same as actually knowing anything about cognitive neuroscience.

[ASalazarMX]

> Asking questions like "How do we know if the visual cortex isn't conscious" is not the same as actually knowing anything about cognitive neuroscience.

Can you explain me how neuroscience proves the visual cortex can't be conscious? Why is it so wrong of me to ask that question?

[virgil_disgr4ce]

You can invent an arbitrary number of meaningless questions, but it's not the same as actually knowing anything about the subject you're inventing questions about. Nobody has any obligation to prove or disprove any of your questions. You have the obligation to prove your claim (if you were to actually make one).

If I walk into a city council meeting and start yelling "Why haven't you greened the fish sun???" all I'm doing is wasting everyone's time, and yet I can then say "Hey, I'm just asking questions! They won't answer my questions!" as though I'm some kind of victim and the city council is some kind of mysterious evil cabal.

Similarly, the phrase "Do your research" is designed to signal that I'm the smart one, the one in the know, the one who knows what's REALLY going on, even though I know nothing about x, y or z.

[adrianN]

We don’t have a definition of consciousness that allows us to tell whether a single electron is conscious or not, so literally anything can be „conscious“.

[andai]

Well, I can provide a thought experiment I did back in high school... imagine a universe identical to ours, except that nobody was conscious. There would be "no one there" to experience it, by definition. So would such a universe exist?

[mannykannot]

Imagination will give you something to think about, but it alone will not tell you which thoughts are correct.

[ASalazarMX]

I guess yes? Why would it cease to exist if no one experienced it? It wouldn't change its physical properties.

[NuclearPM]

That question isn’t as deep as you think it is.

[ASalazarMX]

These kind of trick questions are variations of the tree falling when no one heard it. They aren't asking "did it generate soundwaves?", they're asking "if sound included perception, did it make a sound?". It's weird to ask questions like these outside quantum mechanics, where observation actually affects the result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest_an...

[andai]

If we accept the existence of that which cannot by definition be observed in any way... then is that not an infinitely large category?

[odyssey7]

Check into panpsychism.