[mapontosevenths]

> I’m also curious how you define consciousness.

This is what I came here for. Every article or commenter that attempts to deduce the roots of consciousness should first start by defining it. I have yet to see anyone even bother to seriously try.

If I spent all my time trying to figure out the fundamental forces involved in floopityjoop, but refused to ever define exactly what a floopityjoop was, you would ignore me, laugh at me, or feel pity for me.

[AndrewKemendo]

Hence why I ask

In my experience, “intelligence” and “consciousness” are socially defined categories and can’t be viewed objectively

There’s too much social weight on those to have a firm definition because the social implications are too grave and nobody is willing to give up their philosophy for a precise definition

[mapontosevenths]

Agreed, and just to add to that... It's important.

In the past many attempts to define who (or even what) is and is not conscious led to the exclusion of certain classes of human and animal, and from there to atrocity beyond measure. The p-zombie problem is not only fundamental, it may be the single most important question in all of philosophy and science from a "first do no harm" perspective.

It's not some academic "Umm acshually". The definition MATTERS, and can lead to real world suffering for living beings at massive scale when we get it wrong. So these regularly scheduled "Mechanism For Consciousness Discovered" blog posts that fail to define it first aren't just bad science, they're actively dangerous.

EDIT - To tie it back to this post - If we assume that working memory is involved in consciousness, we exclude people who lack short-term memory. I had a friend in high school who lost most of his due to a traumatic brain injury caused by a car accident. He was, in fact, a conscious being. Just... very, very forgetful and unable to cope well with novel situations.

[d00d0ff000]

I define consciousness as “the inflection of the potential of existential being.” As my original comment suggests, I claim consciousness as the echo chamber of the quantum domain.

Before you call it “quantum magic” understand that the “potential of existence” is the foundation of existential reality and we are “just inflecting” upon this through the electrochemical biotechnology of our brains.

I propose all life and living systems are “of consciousness” however primitive, and memory, temporal awareness, even sense of self are holographic renderings within this domain.

[estearum]

Good luck drawing a line between life/living systems and otherwise.

The panpsychist answer is (unfortunately) the only one that even remotely passes the sniff test.

[d00d0ff000]

No need. In another comment I mentioned a stone has dormant potential of consciousness, and life systems merely animate it.

Someone else posted a decent link to the relationship of “holographic” memory and consciousness. I do not speak with that as my source though it is a relevant idea.

[estearum]

Well consciousness has the "advantage"/curse of the fact that we all know it exists. We just can't prove it to each other.

[mapontosevenths]

Nah. "Cogito, ergo sum" is obviously wrong if we think about it for even a moment. It's a thought terminating tautology at best.

A) Just because there is thinking it does not follow that there is an "I" doing it.

B) Perceiving something does not in and of itself prove that either the thing or the perciever are "real". Some things are real without being perceived, and some things are perceived that aren't real.

C) Even if we grant the reality of the "I", What is the thing that is perceiving the "I" which is doing the thinking? We cant trust something that may be a faulty instrument to report on its own actions.So we can't actually be sure that we are thinking and not just falsly remembering that we once thought. See rootkits for an example. If we're starting from first principles (as Descartes intended) we immediately fail because we require an outside observer.

D)Etc.

Basically every major philosopher since Desacrtes has already had a go at this one. I'm sure there are better arguments against it out there already. These are just the few that spring to mind.

Really, its just the place where Descartes gave up, not a universal truth of some sort.

[estearum]

I didn’t argue “I think therefore I am.”

I argued “experience therefore consciousness.”

No “I” nor “think” nor “am”

To use your language, perceiving something does in fact necessarily imply there is perception happening.

You’re jumping to Descartes (who was wrong), I am pointing to Nagel (who is correct but not in a way that’s very helpful answering the corollary questions of consciousness)

You presumably know consciousness exists at least in the case of you. I know it exists in the case of me. It’s probably reasonable for each of us to assume it exists in the case of each other.

[mapontosevenths]

> You presumably know consciousness exists at least in the case of you.

Just because I "know" something, that doesn't make it true. Or to use the "experience therefore consciousness" version:

Experiencing something doesn't imply that either the subject or object are objectively real. Humans regularly experience unreality (books, games, movies, hallucinations), and the assumption that you exist because you feel that you do is no more valid than the assumption that Mickey Mouse is real because you feel that you have seen him.

To restate more directly, there can be no "objective" reality without others to validate it. Otherwise its only "subjective" reality.

It's been a long time, but I think Hegel really misses the mark. (You mean Hegel rather than Nagel, right?) I think he argued against doubting your own perception, but anyone who has ever taken LSD, or met a mentally ill person, can tell you that there are miles between perception and reality. The way we percieve the self is unlikely to be any more reliable than the way we percieve Mickey Mouse.

[estearum]

Again, I didn't say anything about "objectively real" anything.

Your knowledge of consciousness existing within you is inherently subjective. And yet it's the truest thing any one of us can possibly know (per your point, a simple molecule ingested by mouth can distort nearly everything except the fact of consciousness). No matter how distorted the external/internal data that populates consciousness, the backdrop of consciousness is certainly there.

And no, I mean Nagel, not Hegel.