this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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"What is consciousness?" That is the one question I want to know the answer to the most. I'm sorry cancer patients but if I get to meet an oracle and get to ask one thing that's what I'm going to ask.
I don't even so much care about how it emerges or what are the requirements needed for it to emerge. That is the "easy" problem. What I'm truly curious about is what it is. How can it be that materia gives rise to subjective experience. It's weird! It's something so fundamental yet if you weren't experiencing it yourself you'd have no idea it's even a thing. There's zero evidence for it outside of the mind itself.
Also as Sam Harris says it's the only thing in the entire universe that cannot be an illusion. Even if everything else is fake and the entire universe is just a hallucination/simulation the fact that it feels like something to be in that simulation is still true.
Just a random thought, this reminds me of light. Kinda weird to think about but light is invisible unless it goes directly into your eyes.
Very very strange.
This and time too. You ask the oracle about consciousness, I'll ask about time lol.
"I think therefore I am" ... does that also mean "I thought therefore I was"? or something like that?
Now assume I'm the oracle.
Time is the passage of the story that you are/exist in.
In some more general sense, the universe doesn't so much exist as a physical, real world, but as a story, dream or thought. In that story, you move forward like water flows in a river. That way you experience the passage of time. The landscape already exists, only you get to see it bit by bit. You're welcome.
No, theoretically your whole memory could be an illusion.
Ah right, there's a theory, like "Last Thursdayism" or something.
Yes, also there's the theory of Boltzmann brains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
Good luck. ;)
Why you gotta do me like that on a Monday Morning!? Here we go...
I've now concluded I'm a virtual Boltzmann Brain, thx.
It's a pleasure to be part of the random fluctuation that is your existence. tips hat
I believe that the universe is not all "materia", but that an important part of it is pure movement, that can also take the shape of moving material. If we perceive something through our eyes, then movement (train passing by) acts on itself (the eyes), and that gives rise to the structure of the story, which is consciousness.
This seems to fit well with one of the explanations for what the brain actually is doing or atleast one of the processes running which is trying to guess what happens next.
That seems plausible in my mind.