Science is trying to reduce everything to its smallest constituents -- including consciousness.

There is one problem I have with this:
even if we could observe consciousness as an object and reduce it to a chemical recipe we would still observe this "consciousness-as-an-object" through our own subjective consciousness.

Even when we use the Scientific Method we are observing the results through our own subjective consciousness.
Consciousness seems irreducibly subjective, no?
In this sense, consciousness seems "special"; everything else may be observed "out there" (even thoughts and feelings, relative to "the witnessing consciousness"), but consciousness always remains "back here" ("the eye cannot observe the eye")

What if all objective matter that we see "out there" is, ultimately, really just a projection of our own subjective consciousness? (sincere question).

If so, who would you be addressing that question to?

Myself! And that is what scares me... that I am all alone in this universe, so bored with myself that I have created an imaginary friend called "David Sklansky"

Do you feel lonely?

Oh yeah and this is exactly what you were doing at age 4 or 5 that you first memories begin, you were preparing for this massive plot fiction but you had to go through all the trouble with all kinds of irrelevant things to get here including every single moment of frustration you experienced in anything in that story that of course on purpose did not go your way (like all life is filled with such instances that dont fit the master plan of having our way ). You were totally clueless (me too) about how things work and your imagination gradually created the perfect logical structure including all the difficulty you experienced understanding things on the way to here. Sure. Then again it may very well be the most natural thing of all, that it is all just real simple and we are all living in the only natural world we could.



Consciousness is the observation of the brain in all its glory of action by itself. It happens the same way it will happen to a computer one day. When it has critical mass and it notices itself as part of the game. Wait for it.

You want to know what we are? We are the trillionth level complexity version of a double pendulum. If you watch a double pendulum it appears to have a mind of its own and is totally unpredictable. This is what happens when you have lots of degrees of freedom and nonlinearity. The complexity and intelligence explosion happens. Intelligence is the ability to predict what comes next. This is the game we play at super high speed because we have been playing it all our lives and we got very good at it. That is all.

What if the popularised ideas about emergent consciousness are inadequate? What if in the next 50-100 years the AI's still fail to 'notice themselves as part of the game?' These predictions and ideas about consciousness ought to be made falsifiable; so how many years do you give it?

Collective consciousness is soft headed gobbledee goop.

The real world is more than what we are conscious of, otherwise eveyone's take on reality would be radically different, which is not the case.

The evidence is in yourself. All you need is to go back to your youth and replay the greatest adventure ever. In it you will find in the endless steps the secret to it all. It is the gift of time and relentless experimentation. In the billion(s) of seconds since the beginning with the endless lessons in them you will see the structure get built step by step from the first moment the baby cries and only finds refuge at its mother's blurred image...to the day they solve their first problem of geometry alone. You did not learn to think and perceive yourself in a day. It was very gradual.

If it took the universe 14 bil years to develop it we can afford to take our time to finish the last few steps of decoding of the greatest gift ever patience and natural law created.

Your neural networks first learn to anticipate the world and then they learn to anticipate the main hero of it all. That hero is built out of those millions of seconds of experiments until its properties become very familiar.

Other animals are offering hints they have something not entirely very different. Every time a dog looks you in the eyes briefly you are left wondering what they are thinking. And i am sure there is something there even if very elementary. They know you look back at them too.

A fruit fly is such a tiny insect and still it shows intelligence and manages to evade you often. If you can do such a remarkable thing as avoiding an attack of many different origins with such limited number of cells, imagine what you can do with 1 bil times bigger system and a civilization that has been building its properties over the last 100k years and offering them to each generation richer and stronger. Our so called consciousness is a joke without these last 100k years.

Actually, there are very different takes on reality among everyone. Whether they are radically different comes down to interpreting the word radically individually.

I agree. For example, we have "christians" and we have "hindus", we have "religious people" and we have "atheists", and even among scientists world views are what I consider radically different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interp...ntum_mechanics

Before getting down to consciousness it should be considered that the "senses" are germane.

Color, sound, taste,smell, life,.....and others (12) is the realm of study of what we are conscious of, conscious of.....

Scientific study of the senses is in order for then the relationship of color can be appreciated by understanding the nature of sight and others similarly.

The physiological problem is a problem of "interpretation" as noted by previous posters for all the "senses" are classified into one jumble when it should be obvious that the "sense of sight" is very different than the "sense of sound" and others.

I am "conscious of red" , I perceive "red" and actually carrying it forward; in the act of perceiving a large red wall "I am red".

One approach to the question of consciousness, ala the senses, is to comprehend that the senses are evolutionary entities which are part of the external world. Eyes, ears, taste buds, nasal mucosa,... all have been implanted into the human form from the beginnings .

The external aspect of the eye has been "burned" into the human sockets and the accretion has developed into the human eye. The external aspect of the human eye is very much more of a mineral nature(looks just like a camera) such as the ciliary body and sclera and cornea whereas the further into the eye we have the vitreous humour and retina and nerves and blood vessels which contains "life" . the lifeless meets the "life".

To look for some magical nimbus called "consciousness" is not to think on the reality of the body. Its strange, in our materialistic age we have thoughts which deny the physical yet claim to be the purveyors of great and mighty material, or that which is weighed and measured. yada, yada,yada

Nobody can credibly claim to know what consciousness is. I've tried watching every youtube on the topic and none of the experts knows what it is. Even the radical ideas can't be proven. It's an open question and what I do is just lol at those on here who claim to know and wish that I'd live long enough to learn the truth but that's unlikely.

I think you've jumbled a number of different ideas in your post here, so I'll just speak to one of them.

When philosophers like Nagel talk about consciousness being "irreducibly subjective" they mean that the nature of consciousness just is what it's like to have various conscious experiences. For example, the nature of a conscious experience that we describe as "seeing something that looks yellow" just is what our conscious experience is like to us when we see something that looks yellow to us.

So, understanding consciousness (not why we're conscious, mind you, but the nature of conscious experience itself) requires understanding what it's like to have various conscious experiences in the first place, and in order to do that (so the argument goes) one must actually have those types of conscious experiences.

So, claiming that consciousness is irreducibly subjective is not the same thing as claiming that when we use the scientific method we are observing the results through our own subjective consciousness. Claiming that consciousness is irreducibly subjective is claiming that there is no objective way to understand the nature of conscious experience.

The last 100k years is a joke without our conciousness.

First you exist. And then you define yourself and your place in existence. Not the other way around.

To believe that your existence was defined long before your existence is absurd.

Your existence preexists the existence of your consciousness. unless you think a baby has consciousnesses the way you realize your own right now. So something gradually happens and it gets there. The training of the brain! I can assure you it has no ethereal origin from out there.

My point on the last 100k year is that the version of consciousness that H Sapiens had 100k years ago is very primitive compared to current. Unless you think that this human had the ability to think about the universe and their position and elaborate principles 100k years ago like we do today or even 2.5k or 5k years ago. For the most part it was thoughts about how to hunt and eat something today or procreate or protect family etc. The thoughts about the universe and our position in it came a lot later.

All i am doing is trying to show you that what you perceive as your amazing consciousness is gradually advancing from back then to today and of course all your life so there is nothing mystical about it.

Lol, so when I watch Jeopardy on TV, there's all kinds of conflict over the questions and answers?

Conciousness must appear emergent. If it didn't you could not define yourself or your place in existence. Without the appearance of emergence/causality/induction there is no logic; without logic there is no definition.

The fact that you can define yourself and your place in existence suggests the appearance of emergence. Whether emergence is in fact necessary, to the existence of conciousness, is a little more speculative.

Trivial questions have trivial answers.

To be clear, a dog is conscious but the question of "self consciousness" is reserved for the human being.

There are other types of consciousness within the human mandate; that of "dream consciousness" and "deep sleep consciousness", the latter appreciated by meditative effort.

The idea that we have consciousness because we perform the integral calculus is a cacophonic mélange .

We are conscious of others because of our senses and of ourselves because of a higher sense . To interact with something outside and within ourselves we have senses, many physical and some supersensible such as in the appreciation of a thought.

The dog has conscious behavior but the state of the dog is different than the human being and he doesn't perform the integral calculus.

Imagine yourself without senses but alive and you have "deep sleep" to which most are not conscious and its not all about the day but the night will have its say.

Who has created the best songs? Madonna? Metallica? Mozart?
What is love? What is beauty? What are thoughts? What are emotions?
What is good? What is bad?

Where's Alaska on a map? What is the mass of Mars? How many continents have penguins on them?

spankthebadwookie confuses trivia w trivial and now you're outright putting poetry in the same category as knowledge. It is undeniable that there is such a thing as human knowledge, just as certain as the human experience. P is for poetry itt.

So, Almanacs, and encyclopedias? How do they work?

You have no evidence to back this claim and nor will you find any in encyclopedias or almanacs.

There were several thousand people back then who were better at thinking about this stuff than 90% of present day humans.