Consciousness is the only thing in the universe that cannot be an illusion
Consciousness is the only thing in the universe that cannot be an illusion
I'll start by acknowledging that this isn’t my idea, credit to Sam Harris. I also don’t know if this is even controversial, but I figured this would be a better place to post than in Showerthoughts.
By consciousness, I mean the subjective experience of what it feels like to be. As philosopher Thomas Nagel put it:
'An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.'
It’s at least conceivable that things like free will, the self, or even the entire universe could be an illusion. For all we know, we could be living in a simulation and nothing might be real. Even if you don’t believe that, there’s still a greater-than-zero chance you could be wrong. However, this doesn't apply to consciousness itself. Even if everything is just a hallucination, it remains an undeniable fact that it feels like something to hallucinate. To claim that consciousness could be an illusion is a self-contradictory statement as consciousness is where illusions appear.
Consciousness is as a convenient abstraction to explain the behaviour of human beings, but it doesn't really refer to anything real. As such, I think that the claim "consciousness is not an illusion" is technically correct but misleading, since it implies that consciousness exists.
Nagel's quote is extremely vague, since that ontological "to be" that he uses doesn't really mean anything.
Just the two cents of some materialistic nobody.
Consciousness as defined by Nagel absolutely exists. If one want's to define it differently then that's fair but it's not really an argument against the statement made in the title anymore then.
I'm not changing definitions. I'm stating that what he defined does not exist.
To go a bit deeper: regardless of whatever that "to be" is supposed to mean, the "subjective experience of what it feels like to be" is still an experience. And experiences do not exist in the physical = real = material sense; they're solely abstractions. Like valence holes, software, or so many other things that are not real but convenient to explain the behaviour of real things.
The same applies to concepts like "mind", "soul", "spirit" and similar.
[No idea on why people are downvoting your comment though.]
cogito, ergo sum
This is the only absolute truth, for each of us. I may be a brain in a vat being fed false stimuli. I may be in a grand computer simulation. I may be a resident of Plato's Cave. Everything I believe or guess about the world around me may be an illusion. But I do know that I think, and therefore, in some sense, I am.
"Credit to Sam Harris"
For something that's a well known saying by Rene Descartes?
"Cogito ergo sum" is exactly "consciousness is the only thing that can't be an illusion"
Nihil sub sole novum, as it says in the Bible.
(There is nothing new under the sun)
So your defense of attributing inventions to people who didn't invent them is "well here's a nice passage from the bible, no-one really invents anything anyway".
No they do. They really, really do. Descartes ideas were relatively new.
It was a bit different in say 2000bc or something when there literally wasn't anything new under the sun, as dozens if not more generations would go by without any change in technology or philosophy.
It's very different by the 1600's, as you should know with that username.
If the universe is a simulation then conciousness could be considered an illusion to those outside the simulation. From an internal perspective it wouldnt be an illusion as it's the only thing that we experience.
However we have trouble even defining what counciousness is (an oversimplified quote from a philosopher doesn't cover it) so it seems pointless to make such speculative black and white statements about it.
Consciousness is entirely subjective experience so other people's perspective on it seems quite irrelevant.
What's oversimplified about the definition I laid out?
Yes my point was that if there was a hypothetical being outside our universe looking in they could correctly say that our consciousness is an illusion from their subjective experience.
It's an oversimplification because that is not the scientifically accepted definition of consciousness. It is currently undefined and seems to be an emergent property from the brain, the complex object known to us.
"Something exists. Beyond that I dunno." Somebody give that man some money.
To claim that consciousness could be an illusion is a self-contradictory statement as consciousness is where illusions appear.
This sounds a lot like the "did the chicken come before the egg or the other way around" God is defined as the progenitor of existence, but if something preceded or even paralleled God before existence, then that would have to be the real God instead, based on the ontological definition. That was confusing, but I only mention it because if you could have a "consciousness" which perceives another consciousness as illusory, (like one I could download into a machine) then your own "awareness" is just as relatively illusory as the first one.
Like, the universe comes from God, and some would say that you can't have one without the other. And our perception of the world stems from a consciousness, and some would say you can't have one without the other. I just wanted to talk about the problems that arise when you form a recursive pattern with these foundational ideas. What is really behind consciousness? Can consciousness lie to you? Of course. Should you stop trusting your consciousness? Not completely, you would become a vegetable. Bed sores hurt.
I'm just kinda rambling, but thank you for posting this stimulating topic. This consciousness appreciates it.
Well the idea of panpsychism suggests that consciousness is a fundamental part of the universe. That it's just a property of matter. It doesn't exactly argue, that it feels like something to be a rock, but that consciousness still lies even in rocks on a some level.
I don't exactly have an argument against that theory either, but it doesn't necessarily challenge the fact of individual human consciousness. It really does feel like something to be me. Maybe my consciousness is just a slice of something greater, but the window I experience it thru is very real. For all we know, that "something which existed before God" could just as well be the person running the simulation. Then again something probably existed before that too, and so on..
But from what perspective?
If you take the perspective of someone inside the illusion/simulation, they could be simulated consciousness. But at the same time, from the outside, it isn't actually consciousness because it's all programmatic.
Now, it could be said that any sufficiently complex simulation that mimics consciousness within its parameters is creating consciousness, but it's still the illusion of consciousness rather than the actual thing. Which perspective is real?
Does realness, as in an absolute and objective reality, even matter for consciousness?
Me, I err on the side of any consciousness that is internally perceived as consciousness is real in any meaningful sense, even if it isn't objectively real.
If I dream, and other entities in my dream experience consciousness within themselves, I would call their consciousness real, even though they aren't real. It would be a created, artificial consciousness, it might even be a lesser form of consciousness, but it would still have a given value of realness.
Which, as a side note, dreams where you switch between multiple perspectives as different entities (not always people), and even have different thoughts as different entities are a fucking trip. They're rare, but so damn amazing to experience.
Maybe that kind of dream is creating consciousness, maybe it's perceiving some external consciousness. But it's still a discrete consciousness within itself.
In other words, if it's an illusion that the consciousness typing this is consciousness, then it is such a complete consciousness that it is the same as whatever external consciousness created it. It's subjectively real, and that matters more than any objective reality.
Consciousness is not necessary for illusions. Illusions are products of the senses and we know that unconscious things are subject to them. For example a radar glitch can produce an illusion of an object that isn’t really there. This occurs whether or not the radar operator is actually present in front of the radar screen, so it’s not an illusion of consciousness.
I also think it’s possible to have illusions about whether one is conscious or not. I have personally had fever dreams and found myself in a state where I was not sure whether I was asleep or awake. Similar things can be experienced under the effects of certain drugs, while other drugs can temporarily obliterate one’s entire sense of reality.
One thing we have established somewhat firmly is that the belief that consciousness is the source of decisionmaking is actually an illusion. In the lab we can detect unconscious mental processes attached to decisions which precede (by seconds) people’s conscious awareness of having made a decision.
I wouldn't call a radar glitch an illusion necessarily. It's more like an error or a false signal. I think of it kind of like tinnitus; you hear a sound that's not really there but it's not actually an illusion either.
Similar things can be experienced under the effects of certain drugs
The key word here is experience. The fact that you're experiencing something means you're consciouss. Consciousness is where experiences appear wether they're real or imagined.