Consciousness

What are Veeky Forums's thoughts on the hard problem of consciousness?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

1) not a science problem

2) most people here dismiss it by presuming it's just an emergent property of the brain and then acting like it's a solved problem

3) stop posting this damn thread you dickhead

>1) not a science problem
The job is science is the explain how the universe works. How is it not a science problem if science can't explain subjective experience? Do you deny its existence?

>2) most people here dismiss it by presuming it's just an emergent property of the brain and then acting like it's a solved problem
That's not very scientific. That sounds a lot like something a religious person would say.

>3) stop posting this damn thread you dickhead
:^)

(nsp: not same person)

The job of science is to postulate theories which can be falsified by experimentation. Do you want science to solve Human Consciousness? Then let scientists grow vat babies and cut into their soft little skulls; in fact give me about 100,000 donor eggs and 3 decades and i'll tell you what it is to be man.

The job of philosophy and mathematics is to construct a rigorous argument giving a beautiful and simple solution to a previously intractable problem in a very abstract environment where methods and techniques used to obtain the solution may be ported back into our real world and be used to solve something meaningful.

Do not confuse Mathematics and Philosophy with Science. Mathematics is the art of problem solving, Philosophy is the art of natural language (or asking questions). Science is the method of reliably predicting the outcome of something, it's an approximate guess.

To your question. My thought is that consciousness is like a girl sitting on your face, even after you pay her to leave there's a little bit left of her on you. There is an echo of her sitting on your face. You keep repeating it to yourself and distorting the echo and then eventually another girl replaces her, replete with new echoes and new repetitions and new girls and so on.

At the end you are finite, you will have had your face sat on so many times, and all you are left with is the impression of a hundred sweaty wet vaginas mushed up against your mouth and nose.

>Chalmers' formulation
>Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?

Because if you're some Oxbridge needledick with 50,000 words you're bound to over-indulge in language and under-indulge in living. We do what we are trained to do, we are impressionable robots,

>“Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.”

-Aristotle, child butt investigator, probably.

I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself - we are creatures that should not exist by natural law... We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, that accretion of sensory experience and feelings, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody's nobody... I think the honorable thing for our species to do is to deny our programming. Stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction - one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

>not a science problem
hurr durr not a sciene becaues it's not fit to muh Popper's positivism

Merely trading a biological set of programming for an external set, we are still slaves to atomic motion, and even that is an overstatement of our "agency". Might as well keep fucking and living miserable lives until the same forces that move us around and force us to follow our biological imperatives make our sun even brighter. After that the earths oceans will boil away with all cellular life and we'll just be another Venus.

The problem is people just assume chemical reactions magically can amount to consciousness, completely ignoring the mechanics involved with allowing the actual state of consciousness itself to exist. The reactions only add up to the reactions themselves, there has to be something else involved for consciousness to come into existance. A hidden varaible that makes 2+2 add up to 5 instead of 4.

A good analogy would be to look at nuclear reactions. Take us back to a time where we didn't know about the atom or what goes on below basic chemistry. If someone were to try to explain what was going on in the sun, they would assume that the chemistry-framework THEY KNEW was the cause of it; maybe they would say the sun contained different elements that reacted really strongly with each other, when in fact it was forces completely unknown working much deeper in matter that caused it. That same level of ignorance is now plaguing consciousness discussion.

Neuroscience will eventually solve this problem.

In the meantime, less-respectable fields such as philosophy and psychology will stumble along and come up with non-answers that are consistent with the political beliefs of their practitioners.

You're quite the romantic.
Unfortunately, few share your sentiments. The rest would rather hash it out and die fighting for every breath.