Why do some people talk / write about "consciousness" like it's an actual thing that needs to be explained by science...

>Are you more certain of the Sun rising in the morning with the Earth staying still, or are you more certain of the Earth revolving around the Sun?
My question was one of differentiating between degrees of epistemological certainty. What are you trying to demonstrate with your question exactly?

>People are so used to speaking in terms of the abstraction that it seems obviously real to them as though it were an actual / physical thing and they don't question it.
People aren't saying that consciousness being 'real' makes it physical. Determining if something exists physically relies on the assumption that other things exist physically, which is a necessary assumption to make in order to get out of the pit of solipsism. But anyone who takes solipsism can at least be assured of their own existence, whether they understand the nature of that existence or not. The experience of anything is proof of experience, even if it's illusionary.

You're conflating the issues with measuring objective reality with that of recognizing conscious experience. Ironically, this answers the question you were originally asking. Scientists aren't going to solve this problem because scientists deal with what we agree to as objective reality.

>I believe I'm """experiencing""" something.

>Bam. Your entire argument is still valid.

FYP

Consciousness is real like the operating system on your computer is real.

OP here and I agree with this. I would put the abstractions of software, money (the idea of monetary value itself, not the paper that represents it), numbers, the game of chess, etc. all in the same category as "consciousness" / "qualia." None of them are things you're going to come up with physical explanations for, and that's the problem with the concept of there being a "hard problem;" it's leading people to believe there's some great unknown that needs new laws of physics to explain it when it's really just not a thing at all in the physical sense.

>Experiencing disbelief at somebody not believing experience is a lie.

Let's try to break this down, and avoid using the word consciousness.

If you were to stab your hand, would there be a sensation?

Why would there be a sensation instead of nothing?

>Consciousness is real like the operating system on your computer is real.
Another thing that makes this a hard problem is that we often find it quick and easy to shortcut our arguments with comparisons, as you have done here. But consciousness is unlike anything else for which we have a concept. With nothing that can function as a comparison, at least not of the essence of what makes consciousness special, valid analogies are impossible to produce. Consciousness is not real like the operating system on my computer is real; consciousness is real in a way unlike anything else is real.

>None of them are things you're going to come up with physical explanations for, and that's the problem with the concept of there being a "hard problem;" it's leading people to believe there's some great unknown that needs new laws of physics to explain it when it's really just not a thing at all in the physical sense.
I was the poster who said that scientists won't find a solution to this problem, so it looks like we agree here. Maybe we'll one day have equations and models to explain the conditions necessary for consciousness to emerge though.

>If you were to stab your hand, would there be a sensation?

In reality there would only be pain behavior which we refer to in terms of the abstraction of "sensation." Saying "ow," being compelled to report that you "felt" something, memory formation to get you to continue reporting in that way maybe hours or even days later when the topic comes up, etc. The "sensation" has no reality to it in the physical sense though. It's of this category:

What are you, a philosophical anti-zombie?

>Consciousness is not real like the operating system on my computer is real

Not him, but I disagree. It's a perfect analogy in my opinion. Operating systems don't exist as physical things, but instead as abstractions that we behave in reference to as a trick to get us to input information that a computer can work with as well as to output patterns that we as non-computers can work with. The abstraction of "consciousness" is extremely similar to this. It doesn't exist as a physical thing, but rather as a fictional reference point that we behave and report around. It's very useful to speak and act around it as though it were a real / physical thing in the same way that's true of the usefulness of behaving as though the patterns of light on screens actually exists as a window into another world with imaginary tools in imaginary folders that we can summon up and do things with is useful.

And that would make perfect sense.
....if it wasn't for the fact that you experienced it.

It is literally impossible to doubt experience itself without some very deep-seated delusion.

Now, you can doubt that experience represents reality. But you still experience it anyway.

Just because we don't understand it yet, or understand how it might exist physically, or emerge from the system, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

If you were just to replace "consciousness" with "sense of self" I would agree with you 100%, but it still seems to be utterly insane to claim that you don't experience anything.

>....if it wasn't for the fact that you experienced it.

You only believe you "experience" it. That's all that's required to make you think it's true. You have no way of telling the difference between "real experience" vs. being made to believe and behave around an abstract fictional reference point. The brain makes all of us believe in untrue things on a regular basis, this is one of them. This abstraction is real as a computer program, which is to say we can reference it and get lots of useful benefits out of treating it like a real / physical thing, but in actuality neither it nor a computer program has a tangible presence in the world. The machinery is what's physically real even though the abstractions are what we behave around and what therefore get interpreted as more immediate / fundamental.

How can belief ever be more fundamental than experience? Can you believe something without experiencing thought? Without feeling that you've come to a conclusion? How can belief even be said to exist without experience?

>How can belief ever be more fundamental than experience?

It's more like belief exists and "experience" doesn't (for the more nuanced explanation, see previous posts about the category of non-physical but still useful real-ness I'm ascribing to it).

>Can you believe something without experiencing thought?

Thoughts and "qualia" / "experience" aren't the same thing. The suitcase word "thought" has a couple different processes rolling up to it, but the basic idea is there's a premise (e.g. "I should order a pizza") and it gets referenced by the brain so that you report and behave in response to this premise similar to if you used object oriented programming to create a class object and then had the computer report and behave around it.

>How can belief even be said to exist without experience?

How can't it?

Admittedly, I'm getting sloppy with the semantics because I'm running out of new ways to express the same idea. I feel like we hit bedrock some time ago. Consciousness is not the equal of or even comparable to any other concept within the category of non-physical, although it too is non-physical. If we're going to keep returning to that then I'm ready to bow out of the discussion now.

I really want to take your side, but I can't.

Again, I think this is all very true regarding any sense of self that we have. It's exactly the same as you describe a computer program - our sense of self, ego, """"you"""", """""me"""", are abstractions we work around. But regardless of any belief or deception, and experience is proof of experience and this does raise hard problems.

If you're trying to argue that they don't exist as physical, concrete objects, or as anything more than some pattern of neurons firing, then I will 100% agree with you on that, but you literally can't say that experience doesn't exist if I experience it.

I might just be misunderstanding you, and I really hope I am, because otherwise you'd have to literally be insane or deeply deluded. I mean, sometimes I feel pain. Regardless of any belief or outside reality, """I"""" had that experience.

He was in the huge thread last week and I myself had to bow out after a while.

I experience things, therefore "I" exist. Just because the groundwork for the process is physical doesn't mean the non physical can't exist, especially with a sense of ones own "I". This breeches pretty far into "DUDE YOU DONT EXIST" tier cold hand of science faggotry. Experience above all.

Oh I see what you mean now. My bad OP

EVERYTHING BUT consciousness is just an abstract fiction that only exists as a convenience of language.

a thousand times this

>Not even a philosophical zombie could make that argument to itself.

That depends if subjective experience directly interacts with the biochemical systems of the brain and vice versa, instead of just being a byproduct.

After seeing so many people unable to understand the hard problem, it's starting to become concievable that a lot of people are zombies.

What's to say that there is only 1 stream of subjective experience in your brain? What if you're only one of the many systems that have experiences, and the actions you consider subconscious is still subjectively experienced in another part of your brain? That would mean that there are many conscious entities in your brain that are all experiencing reading this text in one way or another, depending on what functions that part of the brain is concerned with. Suicide then becomes a very direct ethical concern considering a single conscious entitiy is not in charge of making every decision.

This idea begs a question of identity. The thoughts and actions of your person would therefore not longer be you. The only thing that is truly yours is your conscious experience, which is arguably still true even if there is only 1 stream of consciousness, but this illustrates that reality in a clearer way.

>After seeing so many people unable to understand the hard problem, it's starting to become concievable that a lot of people are zombies.

You don't understand the philosophical zombie argument. The entire point of it is there is nothing, absolutely nothing different in the external behavior of p-zombies compared to their normie counterparts.

If you're thinking they'd argue differently:
>You don't understand the p-zombies argument
If you're thinking they'd sound different:
>You don't understand the p-zombies argument
If you're thinking they'd be more likely to deny the existence of qualia:
>You don't understand the p-zombies argument

Moron

Loving this thread. So bad its good

Interesting perspective on conciousness

but it's the opposite, conciousness and sentience are far from human restricted. You can talk to your dog and they can understand you, it's more the other way around rather than the way you see it

>can't explain how something happens
>therefore it doesn't exist
ebin

Do these multiple entities cause effects in the brain (two way causation), or are they passive in the physical world (can't affect, can only be affected)? If the former, how do they synchronize to control the brain?

No, there's nothing to explain because the thing you think exists doesn't. Your complaint is like saying we haven't explained how a magician can saw a lady in half and put her back together because the explanation given to you was that she wasn't actually sawed in half in the first place and that the magician just made you think she was. The sort of "explanation" you're expecting is premised on a false belief. The real thing needing explanation is how that false belief works, not how the non-thing you falsely believe in works.

People like you seem to believe the thought bubble in picture A is a literal / physical thing that needs explaining. It's not a literal / physical thing though. You're really the stick figure in picture B, and it's the behavior you're compelled to engage in when your eyes take in light off of an apple that lead you to speak in terms of the thought bubble / mental image metaphor as though it were a thing in itself.

Look up blindsight. There are people who can still see in the sense that their eyes work fine and if you stick a garbage can in their path they'll walk around it instead of walking into it like a mundanely blind person might. But if you ask them why they moved out of the way they won't be able to give you an answer. They report being unable to see anything. People like you would apparently believe this is a disease of "qualia." The more likely explanation in my opinion though is that it's exactly what the facts tell us: they can see, but they don't have access to reference the information of what they're seeing. They're the perfect example of why regular people tend to believe in the "qualia" concept; it's useful to have these behavioral routines that treat the abstraction of what happens when your eyes take in light as though it were a separate new object in itself.

Sure, but again, the standard philosophical zombie argument is built on the assumption that having subjective experience doesn't affect behavior. If there was to be a 2 way street interaction between subjective experience and the biological systems of the brain, then you could have the slightly different kind of zombie I'm talking about.

One thing that points to this is the question of how the brain can even grasp the nature of the hard questions of consciousness and subjective experience, if consciousness is not directly connected and integrated with it on the biochemical level. One response to this is to say there is no subjective experience, only biochemistry, and thus no hard problem. Another response is to assume that consciousness has to somehow be feeding into the biochemical processes of the brain, and those processes in turn feeding back, similar to what the electromagnetic field theories of consciousness describe.

How they synchronize and control the brain could be exaplained by simple biochemistry. It's just different regions of the brain being responsible for different things.

If we define "entity" as the subjective experience of each system, then it's concievable they have no effect on anything at all, they're simply experience being created by a region of interconnected information.

Why the fuck does anyone actually care? At least mathematical or physics thought/logic experiments lead to some sort of result that is tangible or leads somewhere. Who the fuck cares if consciousness is definable. Literally it only matters to shitty aspie philosophy majors who think that everything has to be defined for it to exist and not the other way around.

Because some people are interested in figuring out how the world works.

>definable

Where are you even getting this from? Nobody's arguing about whether or not it's "definable."

>shitty aspie philosophy majors who think that everything has to be defined for it to exist

It's not that something can't be defined and therefore doesn't exist. It's that abstractions aren't real in the same way rocks or trees are, and "qualia" is an abstraction, not a physical object. The problem of the idea of a "hard problem" is people trying to treat an abstraction like it's a real thing needing a physical explanation instead of a fictional reference point that we behave around.

>the standard philosophical zombie argument is built on the assumption that having subjective experience doesn't affect behavior

It makes that assumption for a good reason. The problem of interaction is a pretty strong argument against dualism. If you ascribe the power of causality to non-physical "qualia" you would also have to argue that physics doesn't explain neuronal firing since now there would be a non-physical cause to when / how neurons fire. In reality, we can explain with classical physics what causes each neuron to do what it does, which suggests there aren't any such non-physical causes in play.

People have lost sight of what the real human "anomaly" is and have twisted it into something unrecognizable with their assumptions.

The issue is about will. A "conscious" action is one that has a measured "will" behind it. We don't know what it is, where it comes from, or what the mechanism that measures it actually accomplishes. Every human observes it to have the qualities of "acting", "constant", and "singular". You could say that one or more of these properties are false, but then you'd have to explain what the body accomplishes by manufacturing such an abstract illusion for itself.

>You could say that one or more of these properties are false, but then you'd have to explain what the body accomplishes by manufacturing such an abstract illusion for itself.

Good question. See:

>Look up blindsight. There are people who can still see in the sense that their eyes work fine and if you stick a garbage can in their path they'll walk around it instead of walking into it like a mundanely blind person might. But if you ask them why they moved out of the way they won't be able to give you an answer. They report being unable to see anything. People like you would apparently believe this is a disease of "qualia." The more likely explanation in my opinion though is that it's exactly what the facts tell us: they can see, but they don't have access to reference the information of what they're seeing. They're the perfect example of why regular people tend to believe in the "qualia" concept; it's useful to have these behavioral routines that treat the abstraction of what happens when your eyes take in light as though it were a separate new object in itself.

Having any abstract illusion accomplishes letting people speak and behave in terms of it instead of in terms of literal reality. It's very similar in its unreality to the program icons you interact with on a computer. They're fictional reference points we behave around so that the level of behavior we operate on and the level of behavior the machine operates on can be made compatible with one another. People are more naturally inclined to work in terms of a physical work desk with folders and physical objects, and the illusion of user interfaces tricks us into thinking we're working with things like that when what we're really doing is reacting to patterns of light on a screen with patterns of keyboard presses and mouse clicks.

And to tied this in with "will" more specifically, blindsight makes it so that behavioral reactions don't bounce off of the high level abstract object of sight. The lower level reactions of body to ocular stimuli are still there, but the higher level reactions like speaking of that stimuli or associating it with memories of similar past stimuli aren't there. So that exposes the usefulness for having that sort of "illusion" even though we exist within the laws of physics and our behavior is ultimately reducible to physics in the same way any other physical object is.

That doesn't explain HOW it's a useful abstraction. What benefit does seeing an imaginary vague force behind actions have?

It does explain it. Think about the condition of blindsight and then consider what they don't have that normal people do, and that's the benefit to having it. You have little electrical storms in the brain representing things like instances of will or "qualia" which end up changing the cause and effect interactions we have and making us behave differently than if these little electrical storms weren't there (like they aren't there in blindsight). If you didn't have the storms of "qualia," you would react at a low level to ocular stimuli but you wouldn't be able to talk about the stimuli or use the higher level information from that stimuli to learn things about the world or to build technology that works based on those things you can learn about the world. And if you didn't have the storms of "will," you wouldn't have societies / laws / civilization to manage group behavior in all the ways that make us civilized. We would be more like lower animals who do little more than fight and eat.

>you wouldn't have societies / laws / civilization to manage group behavior in all the ways that make us civilized.
I don't think you understand the question. Your post has nothing to do with it.

I don't think you understand your own question.

Consciousness debate in a nutshell.