The conscious experience of sentient life is a part of the universe. It exists, it is a part of reality, it is just very abstract, complex, and difficult to study
Why do people dismiss consciousness as pseudoscience and relegate it to the level of horoscopes and crop circles, when in fact consciousness is the most immediate part of the universe we all access on a regular basis?
I don't see you guys outside manually re-deriving Newton's Laws of Motion, but I know that right now you are experiencing consciousness directly. How can you say it's not concrete and an aspect of the universe itself?
With it being established that consciousness is real, how can you furthermore claim that the psychedelic experience is simply a subjective personal experience and therefore unimportant and not "real"?
It's every bit as real as an electron, a waterfall, a bacteria, or a human body. It's just more abstract, more difficult to describe using the noun-verb paradigm of our languages
tl;dr Consciousness is real The psychedelic experience is real All arguments otherwise are mistaking the map for the territory and a result of people confusing themselves with words
>The conscious experience of sentient life is a part of the universe. It exists, it is a part of reality, Cool baseless assertion, OP. >consciousness is the most immediate part There's a belief in immanence we're compelled to have which every psychology experiment ever on the topic reveals is not a very accurate belief at all. In fact the way in which you're compelled to *believe* everything you "experience" seems so immediate, raw, and irreducible is precisely because there's nothing of substance there beyond a useful, fictional reference point you're compelled to believe and behave around. You should be *more* suspicious of the literal existence of something that "perfect" and seemingly "direct," not less. Also the fact that you need to have sensory organs first before you can have information about the world doesn't make the world less real or less "concrete" than your sensory input processing. That'd be like saying the data an MRI has about its own imaging system is more reliable and "concrete" than the data it has on the subjects it images, which is ridiculous. Just because an MRI needs to have a scanning device in order to get to its data on scanned subjects doesn't mean it has better or more reliable information about itself than it does about those subjects. Same with us, just because we need sensory organs in order to get to our data on observed objects doesn't mean we have better or more reliable information about our own sensory processes than we do about those objects. >I know that right now you are experiencing consciousness directly No, what you "know" is that you *believe* we're "experiencing consciousness." And that's all that's required for the useful behavior of treating sensory information (and secondary instances of information about that information i.e. memories / thoughts) as though they were objects themselves: the compelled belief "I experienced this." The brain has no need to create literal "experience" phantasms.
Evan Thompson
>Cool baseless assertion, OP. Are you making this claim in a legitimate way? Are you sitting there, visually observing my post, reading it, thinking about it, coming up with words to write in your reply, writing them and feeling your fingers write them, then hitting enter and feeling satisfied with your post?
If so, how can you deny the assertion? It's axiomatic for me at least, since I am sentient. If you aren't then I guess I'm trapped among many p-zombies.
Nolan Thomas
>The brain has no need to create literal "experience" phantasms. I know it has no need, but it is doing it right now. I am experiencing things. I am not a p-zombie. I know I'm not, it's beyond obvious, it's incomprehensible to even attempt to deny it. I am not a p-zombie, I feel my fingers move as I type this. My consciousness is real, whatever it is. Whether it's background noise of my brain, whether it's an emergent property of the brain's decision-making process that has no bearing on the decisions it makes, I don't know - all I know is that I am not a p-zombie and I am indeed experiencing reality right now.
It is axiomatic for any sentient being. If anything is to be taken as axiomatic, it's the ability to take things as axiomatic, but who is observing them being taken as axiomatic? Me, I am, and I assume you are. If you aren't, then go jump off a bridge since you're denying the existence of the felt presence of immediate experience, so it doesn't matter right?
But you don't want to jump off a bridge, you're being disingenuous and cloaking yourself in abstract notions regarding the possibility of consciousness not existing.
Benjamin Martinez
Define consciousness.
Check and mate.
Jacob Brooks
>It's axiomatic for me Great, then stop talking about it because you're deciding just to accept it as a premise without even beginning to question it. It's a one or the other deal here, if it's your axiom then you don't argue about it because you're just accepting it as a starting premise and if instead you're arguing about it then it isn't your axiom but rather a proposition you're trying to convince us is true. You can't have it both way, pick one. >Are you sitting there, visually observing my post, reading it, thinking about it, coming up with words to write in your reply, writing them and feeling your fingers write them, then hitting enter and feeling satisfied with your post? Most of what you're describing is explained best in terms of behavior. "Thinking" / behaving around the notions of visual "qualia" and/or tactile "qualia" are reporting behaviors. We get the useful, fictional narrative of these things being "experiences" that magically appear to us because that lets us behave around them in ways we wouldn't be able to do if we only had the ability to react to stimuli in an instinctual / automatic way without any of these secondary reporting behaviors emerging to allow for more sophisticated behaviors. Also: >coming up with words That's one of my favorite lies people routinely accept without questioning. It's completely impossible for "you" to "come up with words." The idea of "self" / "you" is applied after the fact to brain activity where words are produced to create a convenient, simplified narrative about this "self" going into a big box of words and picking out the right ones for "your" sentence. >it is doing it right now You *believe* it's doing it right now. That's a pretty important distinction. >I am experiencing things. I am not a p-zombie. I know I'm not, it's beyond obvious, Intensity of belief isn't evidence. Your brain is fully capable of making you strongly believe in something that isn't literally true.
Noah Hill
I literally addressed all of these points specifically in my post. You're assuming I'm making claims that I'm not. I'm not saying free will exists or that my thinking influences my actions, I'm simple saying there is an observer in my head and that is it. Because there is.
>Intensity of belief isn't evidence. Your brain is fully capable of making you strongly believe in something that isn't literally true. Do you not see the contradiction in your sentence? If I was a p-zombie, who would my brain be tricking? I don't think you understand what a p-zombie is.
Ian Long
The reason consciousness isn't studied seriously is because any mention of it draws a clusterfuck of nuts, pretentious posers, know-nothings, and genuinely stupid people, as this thread illustrates perfectly.
Jaxon James
>I literally addressed all of these points specifically in my post. No, you didn't address the fact you need to choose between axiom or not. Choose. If axiom, stop posting, if not axiom, stop acting like you don't need to make a case for it. You can't have it both ways. >If I was a p-zombie, who would my brain be tricking? The brain isn't tricking a "self." It's creating convenient beliefs that result in more sophisticated secondary behavior in response to those convenient beliefs. Those beliefs just happen to have the quality of not being literally true. The general process can be walked through using an example you're less likely to ascribe "qualia" to, like an artificial machine. If you program that machine to respond not only in a direct way to input received from its mounted camera but instead to respond to secondary information produced in response to that camera input, then you'll have the same sort of situation as how our own reporting behavior works. >I don't think you understand what a p-zombie is. I probably understand it better than you do. I've noticed most anons who argue for the literal reality of "qualia" end up not properly understanding what p-zombies constitute and try to argue p-zombies would behave differently from us in some way (completely defeating the point of the concept as Chalmers intended it. But anyway, p-zombies are the subject of a thought experiment David Chalmers came up with to try to isolate the alleged phenomenon of "qualia" while keeping all other physical and outwardly behavioral traits the same. He did this to try to eliminate the possibility of explaining "qualia" in terms of physical factors. Therefore p-zombies are exactly like non-zombies in how they appear, what they say, and how they otherwise behave, with the only difference being they don't have "qualia." So when they look at a "red" object, no "experience" of "redness" appears, though they behave in exactly the same way their non-zombie counterpart would.
Liam Bell
Metaphysics is just semantics user.
Alexander Price
The fact that you can alter """consciousness""" by physical means consistently is more than enough for me to think that consciousness is simply a physical phenomena.
Leo Ross
>baby first dmt experience
Wrong, most esoteric schools study the aspects of human and no human consciousness, and guest what, many concepts are painful difficult to grasp and let alone feel it
And psicodelic experience although great for fun do not reveal nothing because there is no a systematic observation of reality. The point of science is describe and make observation of reality. Not yelling aroud DUDE, GRAVITY, IT'S LIKE ALL AROUND, LIKE WOA, IT'S FUCKING GRAVITY MY DUDE
if you want intro real consciousness studies try kabbalah, Buddhism(as in its original form and not the cancerous western form) etc
James Perry
>Why do people dismiss consciousness as pseudoscience and relegate it to the level of horoscopes and crop circles, when in fact consciousness is the most immediate part of the universe we all access on a regular basis? Because it is so very difficult to describe what the phenomenon even is, and what difference there is between something that has it and something that doesn't have it. When you can apparently imagine two systems being identical except for consciousness being present in one and absent in the other (which is the intuition many people have about computer-simulated brains, for example), this quite rightfully triggers a sanity check of "are you SURE you are talking about a real phenomenon, and not just a confusion in your mind?".
Now personally, I am fairly sure we ARE talking about a real phenomenon, which is quite mysterious to me. But that does not mean the above skepticism is unfounded.
Jaxson Gutierrez
That's like saying a computer program is just a physical phenomena. And although all programs have interaction with the hardware, programs does not appear spontaneously when all hardware is connected
Evan Cox
Computer program IS physical phenomena lol... The code codes the pathway of logic gates to execute to create the program that you see.
For example, you can write a lovely small program in C++ and load it into arudino. Arduino configures its logic gates as according to the code. Then, all you need to do is to supply enough electricity and the Arudino will do as the pre-set gates compel it to do. Without the code.
Owen Wright
Read Descartes, then read the centuries of discussion on consciousness that his writings initiated. This is a very old discussion and you have obviously not learned the basics yet. Why would we waste our time with this poorly-conceived OP?
Tyler Johnson
>It's every bit as real as an electron.
Consciousness is made up of electrons running through the brains circuitry.
Henry Lopez
*Jams you into a machine*
Don't take it personally, I don't hate you. I hate this entire planet. :DDDDD
To be fair, the electrons just hitch a ride on said chemicals.
Evan Moore
This is a good / true explanation, although I would add that programs in the way we deal with them when writing them can be considered abstract objects, which is to say they don't literally exist in this sense, but they "exist" in the same way the make believe "desktop" and "folders" exist on a Windows OS user interface. By behaving as though these abstract objects were real we're able to set up and participate in a framework that guides our behavior in ways that ultimately lets the real physical machinery operate as expected. It's almost like programs /software are productive hallucinations e.g. we act like there's some blueprint we've made that is getting used to build an instance of a process that "reads" the contents of a "table" and "writes" those contents to a "file," but on closer inspection you'll find these are actually all analogies rather than literal cases of the things we're pretending they are. It's a really neat trick where we operate in terms of the idea world and a real world system translates our pretend story into literal physical transactions. A lot of what we do programming or otherwise works like this. I think "consciousness" is one of those things.
Julian Martin
Yes. I agree that computer interfaces are simply idiomatic tools which are based on physicalist events. You can create language and metaphysics based on the idiom itself, but there still is physical causes behind these idiomatic events.
The only thing that I can't quite reconcile in physicalist terms is selfhood. My best working thought is that it's related to waves somehow.
