Consciousness as it’s being discussed is not intelligence or even the ability to reason about one’s own existence. Is both less and more than those things, really just different altogether. It is subjective experience itself, the inner world somehow projected for you by your mind. It is the experience of seeing and hearing, the feeling of an emotion.
This subjective experience is subject to causation. If a doctor stimulates a certain area of the brain, laughter, smiles or cries might occur. If an anesthetic is taken, this could cause consciousness to cease for some time. So we have this connection between the external world and the subjective. I'm curious though, if you stimulated the laughing part of the brain when someone is anesthetized, would they still laugh, even if they aren't conscious? Is consciousness necessary for certain acts?
Well, laughing is behavior, and I'm sure there are secondary motor cortices that could force that when stimulated.
But what you're really asking is, would we experience mirth or humor if stimulated. And we know that's true, at least for memories. Certain hippocampal stimulations elicit associated memories.
The problem is not whether biology is related to consciousness (it is), but how?
If the explanation for how it works is something along the lines of, a electrochemical wave passing through a network under x conditions. Will people be okay with it? If you have the whole thing on video, so to speak, where you can see the whole mirthful experience unfold, and can recreate it elsewhere, will that be enough? I guess I'm asking what the standard is for explaining how consciousness arises?
If we made a machine with the capacity for simulating intelligence, the ability to reason about one's own existence, and furthermore, gave it the ability to simulate a belief in its experience of seeing and hearing and feeling emotion and a survival instinct, would it be ethical to destroy such a machine? At that point, wouldn't it protest its own sentience, consciousness, and desire to live as convincingly as a human?
That’s really a separate question. We really can’t be sure that other people are conscious at all either. Consciousness may have behavioral consequences, but it’s not clear that it is necessary for those behaviors. Perhaps those behaviors can come about some other way.
Our ability to talk about consciousness doesn’t prove much either, because it turns out we can’t explain the idea in words. Trying to explain consciousness comes down to statements like: it’s the difference between seeing and !!!seeing!!! We can only communicate its true nature by way of alluding to the other’s experience of the same, not by direct explanation.
I don’t think it’s helpful to being morality into it. Depending on your moral views, there might be good reason to treat things that we think are conscious as if they are conscious. That’s arguably what we do with other people. It doesn’t speak to the underlying questions though.
If, as you surmise, we're discussing a concept which cannot be articulated and which has no moral consequence then what underlying questions remain and what use should we find in answering them? It strikes me as similar to logical paradoxes--a fuzzy ambiguity more likely reflective of limitations in our languages and our particular models of reasoning than of any underlying physical truth.
Consciousness is real because we experience it. If anything, the existence of our own subjective experience is the only thing we can be sure of. Usefulness has no bearing on it.
While I’m suggesting above that conscious experience itself is probably irreducible and uncommunicable, that doesn’t mean that we can’t understand its causes and effects. It seems highly plausible that consciousness plays some functional role in the human brain, the understanding of which could be useful for medicine and AI.
Finally, I find plenty of utility in the joy and wonder of trying to understand this universe. The existence of consciousness as one kind of phenomenon or another has profound implications for our understanding of it, disproving some hypotheses and suggesting new ones.
It seems highly plausible that consciousness plays some functional role in the human brain, the understanding of which could be useful for medicine and AI.
Evolution produces things which aren't "useful" all the time. Examples: That dimple above your upper lip. The blind spot. The human coccyx...
The existence of consciousness as one kind of phenomenon or another has profound implications for our understanding of it, disproving some hypotheses and suggesting new ones.
You didn't answer the question. So the consciousness of the illusion is real? One of my girlfriends was a voracious reader, but couldn't for the life of her recall anything out of them. She used to joke that I was "functionally illiterate" because I'd take six months to read something like Kavalier and Klay, but I could remember certain scenes in great detail. Is my ex-girlfriends' experience of her reading books real? Reading gives her great pleasure, so she must experience such pleasure. Her experience seems to be like mine when I recall having a dream where I felt certain emotions, but the contents of the dream fade out of my memory. Is her experience of reading and my experience of dreaming real?
If one deeply introspects about the nature of one's experience of experience, one may come to realize there's a certain fragmentary nature to consciousness.
Have you ever had episodes of behavior, for which you have no memory? "Blackouts?" I have. What if consciousness is simply an interesting epiphenomenon, unnecessary for thought and decision making? If all we have are people's reports of it, why should we accord any more epistemological significance to it than we do to religious experiences?
As for the illusion question, it’s missing the point.
It doesn’t make sense to call it an illusion. Your conscious experience may accurately reflect reality, but that doesn’t change the fact that you are experiencing the phenomenon of consciousness. That our consciousness is more fragmented than we at first think is similarly irrelevant to the hard problem; fragmented or not, the subjective experience lacks explanation.
It’s very well possible that consciousness is unnecessary for thought. I strongly doubt that it is totally useless altogether, but that’s certainly possible too.
Even if you believe it is probably useless, we investigate things of dubious utility all the time, often discovering unforeseen uses along the way.
So the question remains: why are you so eager to dismiss the defining feature of the human experience?
Am I? If consciousness were a phenomenon no one had a memory of, would we even know it to exist? We certainly wouldn't be having this discussion. I can imagine a consciousness without memory, but I can also imagine a fantasy unicorn in real life. This doesn't mean either exists.
As for the illusion question, it’s missing the point. P
I don't think so. I think it's very significant that there's little difference between the consciousness of real sensory information and consciousness of illusion.
Even if you believe it is probably useless, we investigate things of dubious utility all the time, often discovering unforeseen uses along the way.
So you have no proof for your assertion. Only a suspicion. Perhaps a well founded one, I could even grant that.
If consciousness were a phenomenon no one had a memory of, would we even know it to exist?
Absolutely. We have awareness in the current moment. Memory is not required. In fact, if you think about what memory is, it's a current, internal experience that we associate with a concept called the past. All memories are actually experienced in the present, making awareness more fundamental than memory.
Without memory, the contents of awareness would be very different, sure, but it's not a prerequisite for awareness itself.
Since when? (Not just a joke. Also a serious question.)
In fact, if you think about what memory is, it's a current, internal experience that we associate with a concept called the past.
Uh, no. I can remember what I had for dinner last night without having a flashback where I re-experience last night as in some kind of dream.
Without memory, the contents of awareness would be very different, sure, but it's not a prerequisite for awareness itself.
How do you know? There are people who can't move short term memories into long term storage, but they can remember enough to be able to play Tic-Tac-Toe, for example.
> Uh, no. I can remember what I had for dinner last night without having a flashback where I re-experience last night as in some kind of dream.
Just because a memory is not as vivid as sight or a dream, doesn't mean it's not currently in consciousness. Think about it, when you're remembering, you're aware of something: the memory. It could be a fact you're aware of, or a diminished sensory experience playing in the mind's eye, but you're still aware of it.
> How do you know? There are people who can't move short term memories into long term storage, but they can remember enough to be able to play Tic-Tac-Toe, for example.
That example is about memory and behavior, not awareness. A complete anterograde and retrograde amnesic would still have an experience of seeing (some odd shapes) and emotion (being confused, stressed, etc). And in fact, this is what we think the consciousness of pre-long-term-memory infants is. To quote William James: "blooming, buzzing confusion".
> Do we have any verifiable examples of consciousness where there is absolutely no memory? I very much doubt it.
That's true only because 99.99999999999999% of humans have no memory deficits. It's correlated but there's no causal relationship needed. The only thing an amnesic can't be aware of is a memory they can't access or that was never formed.
