Consciousness

I saw a reddit AMA where Richard Dawkins was asked "what is the biggest mystery to science?" and he answered consciousness was.
What do we not understand about consciousness?
To me it seems like it is just simply the ability to reason?

Here is my thinking for this.
intelligence = ability to reason. with reason/logic being a limited thing (deduction upon reality, reality being limited) so too will the ability to apprehend this deduction
(intelligence) be limited.
hypothetically if a person we're to be absent all ability to reason, their mind being equatable to a sort of fathomless dream, are they
still an intelligent being?
no they are not. if define intelligence as ability to reason, without reason there cant be intelligence.
consciousness = an apprehension of reality
if they do not have the ability to reason they do not have the ability to apprehend.
therefore consciousness = ability to reason

> biologists
> scientist
Turbulence is the biggest mystery

Being so smart that you perceive actions before you're doing them. It's a rather ambiguous term as were not the only things living, just the only ones deciding to live. Not all decisions are conscious, so how are we to tell which part of our thinking is the conscious bit? There are of course levels of conciousness as in some people are infinitely less concious in their decision making. Most decisions have been social and cohabiting ones, even though they persisted from times we would not have considered ourselves as concious. Is relating to another's intelligence what simply defines consciousness, is IQ a measurement of that or is knowledge unconscious?

itt: autists not understanding he means the hard problem, which Dawkins is at least aware enough to concede exists, unlike other autists such as Dennett

Biggest mystery is quantum. This includes consciousness.

"Not all decisions are conscious, so how are we to tell which part of our thinking is the conscious bit?"

Doesn't my hypothesis of " if a person we're to be absent all ability to reason, their mind being equatable to a sort of fathomless dream, are they still an intelligent/conscious being?" show what part of our thinking is conscious?

It being just the ability to reason/deduct pattern. If we did not have this we would have no ability to psychologically apprehend anything. Is that not consciousness?

Our minds would be absolute slaves to the reactionary properties of themselves, without the (perhaps superficial) separation consciousness provides.

>itt: autists not understanding he means the hard problem, which Dawkins is at least aware enough to concede exists, unlike other autists such as Dennett

We cannot really solve the hard problem of consciousness before we've solved the hard problem of freezing.

heard that a million times, it's a sloppy false equivalence and you are either stupid or being extremely disingenuous if you can't see that. fuck off dennett

consciousness is the ability of matter to have a subjective experience, a inner life. we have no idea how it works.

unfalsifiable nonsense
it's a problem in philosophy, not in science

it's a very real problem. consciousness exists and we have no way to fit it in our current framework of understanding.

understanding of WHAT? what kind of understanding?

this is absolutely unrelated to science. it's a problem in philosophy.

>yfw free will doesn't actually exist as you are a slave to hormones, stimuli, and your subconscious

science tries to explain or model nature. consciousness is a natural phenomenon.

>understanding of WHAT
understanding of how the universe works

how is it a problem of philosophy?

science doesn't "explain nature". science gives falsifiable models that correspond to the locality of current observations

something as broad and ill-defined as "how the universe works" is completely inside philosophy, just as something as broad and ill-defined as "consciousness".

but we can come up with theories of how consciousness arises and we can test them. that makes them falsifiable right?

consciousness is also not ill-defined.

you can't come up with theories of how something as ill defined as consciousness "arises"

not falsifiable, scientific theories

if you think so, mate. you're clearly being dogmatic here and there's no use arguing with you.

>I can assert things without any shred of evidence but if you do so you're being dogmatic
then fuck off if there's no use

Recommend David Chalmer's writings on consciousness. He's a philosopher with a good understanding of the underlying science.

If it is true that consciousness is a reflection of some as of yet undescribed biological or bio-physical process, it's still not clear what it is.

It's a category mistake to suppose consciousness is "made up of" some elementary stuff, as if it were a material substance. Clearly it is not.

Even still, we recognize some atomic structure in consciousness in the form of qualia and distinct sensations. However, "consciousness is" is always "consciousness of" in the sense that philosophers have argued until they are blue in the face that one of the necessary and sufficient properties of a conscious state is its intentionality--what it points to, its object.

Conscious activity is best thought of as existing for some adaptive purpose. That purpose is to summarize the information in the brain, which is too much for the agent to tally on its own. Consciousness bottlenecks and dripfeeds the huge parallelized activity of the brain into a focused lens containing only the points that important to biological survival and reproduction or closely related reinforcers.

There is no 1 to 1 mapping of thoughts to synapses. There are no material traces of memory in the brain. We cannot plug brains together or say download a book into ourselves. We don't quite understand how the brain works or what consciousness really is or what exactly separates our version of it from that of an animal or a hypercomplex AI.

This is because discussion on these subjects branches into a bunch of assumptions and undefined and interchangeable terminology and generalizations that apply loosely to anything but directly to nothing. Hence, psychology.