Human Consciousness

Is consciousness (read; not the same as intelligence) a benefit or a hinderance to our development as a species?

How is being able to predict the future not a type of intelligence?

Consciousness isn't real

con·scious·ness
ˈkän(t)SHəsnəs/Submit
noun
the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings.
"she failed to regain consciousness and died two days later"
the awareness or perception of something by a person.
plural noun: consciousnesses
"her acute consciousness of Mike's presence"
the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world.
"consciousness emerges from the operations of the brain"

Seems real to me.

What I meant was to clarify that intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing. Computers are arguably intelligent, but not conscious by any means.

Please elaborate.

>Dictionary definition
Can you get any more dilettantish?

>aware
Useless, circular definition.

Not addressing the point.

That's because the answer is obvious. How could being able to see the future be a hindrance?

Your statement makes no sense. Consciousness is not the ability to make forward projections. Again, we have computers that can do that right now.

Not in the same way. A computer can only guess whereas a conscious mind can actually know. Everybody should be well aware that there is a distinct difference between what we see as a conscious action vs what we don't see as a conscious action. That difference is the perceived presence of a moving force, a force that machines have not yet been able to measure.

awareness can be defined as "knowledge of" which is about as easy to understand as they come.

You invest so much in it, don't you? It's what elevates you above the beasts of the field, it's what makes you special. Homo sapiens, you call yourself. Wise Man. Do you even know what it is, this consciousness you cite in your own exaltation? Do you even know what it's for?

Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you've forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterwards, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody's told you that even waking souls are only slaves in denial.

Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricity's already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self 'chose' to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary—almost an afterthought— to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: it reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other.

But it's not in charge. You're not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn't share living space with the likes of you.

Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it.

Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.

Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for decades. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents.

Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step.

Oh, but you can't. There's something in the way.

And it's fighting back.

Why are you asking me to combat my own consciousness with a conscious action lmao

You're an idiot.

Who wrote that?

What did he mean by this?

Bickel-style questioning whether or not we are actually conscious? maybe? I dunno

Every time.