What is consciousness? Is it truly the only non-physical thing

What's your reason for believing in this "physical universe" you're describing?

Google Galen Strawson's essay in the WSJ or some shit recently. Like May of 2016 maybe?

lmao what makes you think it isint physical? sources for our brains and chemical reactions not being real please

>>1599433

>What is consciousness?

Faculty that enables an individual to become aware of something.

it's just chemicals, bro, don't worry about it.

>>1599433
It's an emergent property of chemical reactions and electrical signals in the brain.

But that's an unsatisfying answer for too many people. Consciousness is magic, Santa is real, and your parents aren't disappointed in you.

>>1599467
Nigga do you even David Chalmers?

>>1599467

>It's an emergent property of chemical reactions and electrical signals in the brain.

You described what caused it, not what it is.

>>1599470
Of course not. Anyone who puts stock into p-zombies should be discarded.

>>1599481
Irrelevant to this point.

>>1599433
Are we talking thinking or experiencing?

The former is essentially any information system that uses an internal semantic language to independently synthesize and distill symbolic representations of other things.

The former, qualia, is in all likelihood a type of physical property that doesn't interact with mass and energy in a conventional way, if at all, so it seems very mysterious to us because it's difficult and potentially not possible to measure, at least with any technology we have invented yet. Also, panpsychism is consequentially probably accurate.

>>1599641
As you can see I goofed there and meant latter in that second paragraph. You're aware and I'm aware, we'll move past it.

>>1599458
And what is "aware?"

>>1599641

How do you think without experiencing?

>>1599651

Being cognizant of something.

>>1599656
But birds, dogs, and other animals are cognizant of many things. The bird is cognizant about where it may lay its nest, the dog is cognizant about where it might have puppies, they are cognizent about where to feed, but also where to breed, where to give birth, and where to relax. When given the opportunity to be familiar, they know whether a person or an animal or a thing is a friend, a foe, or a neutral party.

>>1599433
>What is consciousness?

It's an extremely complex process produced (for the most part) by the workings of your brain.

>Is it truly the only non-physical thing in our universe?

Nope, it's entirely physical. There are no minds without brains.

>>1599664

So?

>>1599653
Why couldn't information interact in a semantic system without experiencing? I mean humans and vertebrae in general in earth evolved to take particular advantage of phenomenal experience because it's a really fucking useful and convenient property for creating symbolic language but I don't see why that means it has to be there for thinking to occur.

>>1599667

>It's an extremely complex process produced (for the most part) by the workings of your brain.

That doesnt explain what it is, only what produces it.
And you were extremely bad at explaining what produces it as well.

>>1599664
So if being cognizant of something is achievable by common animals, and if that is the definition of being "aware," and if consciousness is the faculty that enables us to become "aware" then that means birds, dogs, cats and other animals have a consciousness, which we know they don't.

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>>1599667
>Nope, it's entirely physical.
>He fell for the materialist meme

>>1599673

I am not asking you why, or why not, Im asking you how do you think without experiencing?

>>1599679

>which we know they don't.

How do you know that?

>>1599673
In fact, surely our subconscious does thinking without relaying any phenomenal /experiential information to our 'conscious' part of our brain. So this shouldn't even be a controversial point.

>>1599679

>animals have a consciousness, which we know they don't.

Do you have a single fact to back that up?

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>>1599683
>Descartes
>Convinced he can't prove the existence of anything other than the immaterial in himself
>Only disproves illusions through the concept of a benevolent god
>Even if existent, benevolence is still disputed even among believers
>Mfw

Materialism is the future, brother.

>>1599679
>>1599664

Consciousness is the ability to know that we are aware.We are cognizent that we are aware. Animals dont.

>>1599712

>Consciousness is the ability to know that we are aware.

Wrong.

>We are cognizent that we are aware

So what?

>Animals dont.

Prove it.

>>1599712

Are you witting that you are cognizant that you are aware?

>>1599712
>Consciousness is the ability to know that we are aware.
This is actually just one meta-cognition, which is just a thought about another thought.

Consciousness is just what we call a thing that probably isn't what we think it is. Concepts 'don't exist' in general.

>>1599712

>Consciousness is the ability to know that we are aware

You do realize that 'to be conscious', 'to know' and 'to be aware' are synonyms right?
You literally just said that consciousness is the ability to be conscious of us being conscious.

>>1599685
I said what thinking is and it didn't have anything intrinsically to do with experience. What makes you believe you would need to experience to think? I mean I more less agree if you just mean to say we incidentally have to experience when we think because qualia seems to be embedded directly into the physical structure of our particular universe.

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>>1599708
>Materialism is the future, brother.
It is the future if the emotions of mankind are whittled down and made so petty that the significance of our thoughts, ambitions, interests and desires are put in such a marginal position as to be on the physical plain. There is more to a mind than its physical body, this is evidenced by the fact that the potential of the mind in each individual to create, to do, to say, to think, is infinite, while the finite part of mind, the brain, provides certain barriers for us to operate from within, I.E, memory. Think of the mind as a ship sailing on the sea, the capacity of that ship to hold any sort of cargo or to decorate itself as it likes or even WHERE it sails is entirely within your countrol, but certain factors are not, such as the cloth in the sails and the wood that the ship is made from. These are the physical limitations of the finite, and thereby the physical, while the limitations/potential of the inside is infinite and thereby spiritual, this is further evidenced by the fact that we cannot transmit our thoughts into the material plane on their own (I.E, you cannot attach a few wires to your brain and come up with images on a screen for what you are thinking of.) This can only be filtered through your physical mind. Another example would be a water-well, only you with your wooden bucket are able to draw the water from the well. If you do not have the bucket (I.E, If you are another person.), you have no way of knowing that there is water inside that well, or even WHAT KIND of water (personality, ambitions, etc.) You can only be sure that there is water because you too, and everybody else, also have a well of the same kind, but each with a different variety and quality of water. But you cannot really be sure that the water in the wells of others exist, only you can see your water. This water is the infinite mind and your bucket is the finite mind. The water in the well cannot be seen or manifested. It is spiritual.

How can people say that consciousness is grounded in reality and is just the chemicals in your brain?

>>1599728
>Concepts 'don't exist' in general
They exist within our minds. If concepts do not exist, yet they exist within our minds, the only conclusion we can come to is that our minds are not of this physical plane.

>>1599748
Because they are under the the inner workings of their mind is a purely physical scenario instead of one that takes place outside of our plane, where an item from our mind is not compatible with an item in our physical world unless filtered via the bridges between our minds and our brains.

>>1599748
It's not just the chemicals, it's also the organization of charges and connections causing patterns of activation.

>>1599740

>What makes you believe you would need to experience to think?

To think you need some material to think about.
That material are sensations either by memory, direct external obtainment or imagination.
Any of those 3 require you to experience the sensation otherwise it doesnt get taken in and if it isnt in then it cant be processed.

>>1599740
>What makes you believe you would need to experience to think?
Imagine a color you have never seen before.

>>1599765
Why can't information in general/of any type be the material? I mean, experiential information is a type of information but it's not the only type.

>>1599775
If I said 'I can't', what would your point be?

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>>1599676

What part of "extremely complex process" didn't you understand? You want to now the details? They're a matter of public record, have fun making head or tail of neuroscience journals and biochemistry textbooks. Philosophers have always assumed "consciousness" is a "thing" because it seems so "simple". Science has discovered that teh trick to consciousness is that there is no trick, it really is as staggeringly complicated a sit looks and if you want to even try to understand it, it will take a considerable effort on your part and not a post on an Australian shitposting forum.

>>1599683

Explain how a non-physical "thing" interacts with a physical "thing"

>>1599788
That you cannot imagine something without experiencing it first. Even if you imagine something completely new, it will always have shreds of things that you have experienced, much like a quilt.

>>1599781

Sensations are necessary for whichever information type you desire to compute because it is through the sensations that we represent any other information type.

Lets take >>1599775
Anons reasoning and twist it a little.

Imagine or remember 'number 3' without any sensation. You cant.

Imagine or remember 'freedom' without using any of the senses. You cant.

Imagine or remember your girlfriend without being able to represent her in any way. You cant.

You need to be able to represent something before being able to change(Think, process) it otherwise you have no way of knowing whether you changed something to begin with.

>>1599794
>Explain how a non-physical "thing" interacts with a physical "thing"
If the dreams that you have at night are not on our physical plane, yet they still "happen." I.E, they created the emotions and thoughts associated with whichever scenario you are dreaming of, then you have just interacted with your infinite mind, able to create images and scenes completely independent of the outside world at that moment in time. Obviously your infinite mind is bound to your finite mind because of the damage that can be done to your infinite mind by damaging your finite mind. (Alzheimer's, for instance) And if that is the case, then your infinite mind is bound to your body, because only your body experiences those dreams. It is possible for physical things to create the perimeters for an infinite thing to come into being on the infinite level, yet these infinite things are bound to physical things like our body. Think of it as the windows to the lower levels of a ship, the ship is sailing on the sea, yet the window you are seeing leads into the infinite abyss of the ocean. Your infinite mind is an infinite object existing on an infinite level, but because of your body, it is leashed to the finite and physical plane. Only when you die can this infinite knowledge set itself free. In a way, this infinite mind could be called "the soul." but I believe that would be too presumptuous, because in order to confirm that, we would have to try and understand the fundamentals of the soul as much as we are understanding the fundamentals of the finite and infinite mind.

>>1599832

You do realize that 'soul' is just a word used to translate Ancient Greek 'psyche' which just meant 'the mind' and nothing else?

>>1599843
The definition of what constitutes a "soul" in the contemporary western mind has changed spades since the ancient Greeks, especially with the introduction of Hindu, Abrahamic, Jain, and Buddhist themes.

>>1599832
>If the dreams that you have at night are not on our physical plane, yet they still "happen."

Dreams are caused by observable brain states. Just because your consciousness is asleep doesn't mean your brain stops working and it doesn't make your thoughts (in this case, dreams) any more non-physical.

>>1599847

What you mean is the concept has shrunk as science has claimed more and more of it's presumed attributes. Oh it's not your /literal/ breath, that's just a metaphor! Oh it's not you /literal/ mind, that's just a metaphor! Oh it's not /literally/ real, that's ju- oh wait.

>>1599829
>Sensations are necessary for whichever information type you desire to compute because it is through the sensations that we represent any other information type.

I agree that this all incidentally true because that's precisely how we evolved but I don't see why we couldn't imagine a thinking being in some alternative universe that uses non-experiential/non-quale types of information to represent other things within its own internal symbolic language.

>>1599667
Isn't there a guy with an IQ of 150 who is missing like 95 percent of his brain matter?

>>1599851
Explain to me how there can exist vast palaces, solar systems, and giant crabs chasing me in the form of "waves" that I am also able to translate into images. How does one translate "waves" into scenarios?

>>1599860
No.
Each culture and religion assigned certain qualities and functions and obligations to the soul, for most of European History those definitions have been stooped in either the Pagan form or the Abrahamic form, but with the introduction of Vedic and other non-vedic Eastern religions such as Jainism, Buddhisms, and Hinduism, the functions and destinations and qualities of a "soul" began to measure up against the Abrahamic Christian ones, very few functions of the "soul" as explained by these cultures are explainable by scientific standards.

>>1599867
That's what is so strange, we can't imagine that, but we have the capacity to create that in the form of artificial intelligence. Isn't that strange?

>>1599869

Yes and he's amazing. But take a look at the part he's missing, it's the middle bit that's largely structural, he has plenty of the precious outer cerebellum that does our thinking. Most of your brain is not actually neurons, its glial cells that hold the whole thing together. They're why brains have that jello consistency.

>>1599875
"Waves" refer to cycles of relative electric activation/disactivation of neurons. REM sleep, when dreams occur, has activation patterns most similar to those found in the waking state, just more random. Notice that your examples of the fantastical nature of dreams mostly come from things you have seen or experienced in life, but assorted a but more randomly. For example, you've seen or experienced chasing, crabs, and the concept of something giant in waking life, and in the REM/dream state these are randomly combined into whole you've never directly experienced but is composed of experience. It is all electrical activity and it is all material.

>>1599884
Neocortex. Cerebellum is for inhibiting/fine-tuning motor instructions

>>1599898
You still haven't proved how electric activity could translate into perceived images. I know how computers put up images, they do it via a system of ones and twos repeated millions of times to produce the result, but what of thoughts and images? By what electrical system do they produce these images?

>>1599875
>Explain to me how there can exist vast palaces, solar systems, and giant crabs chasing me in the form of "waves" that I am also able to translate into images. How does one translate "waves" into scenarios?

Dreams are caused when the brainstem gives off "static" during REM sleep. Why it does this is to do with how our long-term memory works. When people lose the ability to REM or are prevented from it by researchers or torturers lose the ability to form new memories. However, this process is subconscious, "we" are not directly aware of it. When "we" experience this static, "we" interpret it in terms of known reality. This is because that is what "we"is for: our self conscious self's purpose in the "ecology" of our minds is to paint a coherent narrative out of the experiences we have. While we're sleeping, our brain is still active, and when the brainstem does it's memory thing, our inner narrator does it's best to form a coherent narrative out of it. Dreams are usually forgotten very quickly, you only remember one if you wake up during it, so your sample of all your dreams is pretty low even if you keep a journal, but if you look for themes in your own dreams you'll soon realise they for the most part contain the events of the previous day, as you would expect from a memory-forming process. How many times have you woken from the dream of doing a full days work, only to realise you have a full days work in front of you?

>>1599875
>the functions and destinations and qualities of a "soul" began to measure up against the Abrahamic Christian ones, very few functions of the "soul" as explained by these cultures are explainable by scientific standards.

Go on then. Give me the functions of the soul, as you understand them.

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>>1599903

Whatever, nerd.

>>1599905
>do it via a system of ones and twos
Ones and zeros, which are actually patterns of on/not-on. Combinations of on-off are summed in different ways to produce other numbers which get translated etc. It is a very complicated system. In certain ways this is analogous to the patterns of activation in the neurons which can get summed in different ways and contexts, but you shouldn't get too caught up in the metaphor. The best thing to do would be to get reading, as there is a wealth of information dedicated to this exact topic in any neurology journal.

>>1599920
Notice how, like he said, the outer neo-cortex is the part that remains? This is the part that is well-developed in mammals and extremely well-developed in humans in particular, and allows for the higher order thinking and planning we're known for and is very capable of plasticity.

>>1599938
>he
I should clarify, I (>>1599903, >>1599938) meant that >>1599898 was mostly right about his explanation, he just misplaced a word.

>>1599945
Christ, meant that >>1599884 was correct minus the word.

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>>1599938
>>1599945
>>1599948

Jesus Christ.

>>1599433
>>What is consciousness?
One of the end results of the chemical reactions in your brain.

>>non-physical
No. Damage your brain and you either die or are radically changed in some way.

>>1599976

See:

>>1599676

>>1599991

You are asking for a simple answer to an impossibly complicated question. Just because we have this word "consciousness" does not mean we can isolate such a thing in the brain, it turns out to be far more complicated than that.

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Ugh.

Consciousness/ experience is a property of nature.
We become aware of nature directly through our senses, and form ideas about it through abstractions.
Our nerve input channel patterns produce the senses: touch, vision, etc.
Our recursive, self-referential internal brain patterns produce abstractions: thoughts, emotions, beliefs, etc.
We **cannot know** what kinds of experiences exist "elsewhere" than our brains in this universe.
We hypothesize about the experiences of other places by conjecture and reason. e.g., other humans have minds like mine, higher animals have minds less like mine, lower animals still less, etc.
There is no true "person/non-person", "life/non-life", "matter/energy" distinction. There is only what is. All other directions are abstractions created by our brains.
Panpsychism is true. Epiphenomenalism is true.
We can never explain what consciousness "is". To do so we would need to explain it in terms other than its effects. But those effects are our entire experience of the world from which we can never escape.
Hope this helps.

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La conscience est une petite flamme invisible et qui tremble. Nous
pensons souvent que son rôle est de nous éclairer, mais que notre être
est ailleurs. Et pourtant, c’est cette clarté qui est nous-même. Quand
elle décroît, c’est notre existence qui fléchit ; quand elle s’éteint, c’est
notre existence qui cesse.
Pourquoi dire qu’elle nous donne de ce qui est l’image la plus imparfaite?
Cette image est pour nous le véritable univers : nous n’en
connaîtrons jamais d’autre. Pourquoi dire qu’elle nous enferme dans
une solitude où nous ne trouverons jamais de compagnon ? C’est elle
qui donne un sens aux mots société, amitié ou amour. C’est en elle
que se forme le désir, mais aussi le sentiment de la possession, qui
est la possession elle-même.
Lorsque la conscience cherche un objet en dehors d’elle et souffre
de ne pouvoir l’atteindre, c’est qu’elle souffre de ses limites et qu’elle
cherche seulement à grandir. Car il ne peut y avoir d’objet pour elle
que celui qu’elle est capable de contenir. On peut bien dire qu’elle est
enfermée en elle-même comme dans une prison : c’est une prison dont
les murs reculent indéfiniment.

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>>1600695
Mais qui pourrait penser que la conscience est une prison, sinon
celui qui clôt toutes ses ouvertures ? Lorsque la conscience naît, l’être
commence à se libérer des chaînes de la matière ; il pressent son indé-
pendance : une carrière infinie s’étend devant lui qui surpasse toujours
ses forces et jamais son espoir. À mesure que la conscience croît, elle
devient plus accueillante ; le monde entier lui est révélé ; elle communique
avec lui et une joie la remplit de trouver autour d’elle tant de
mains qui se tendent.
Il n’y a point d’état de la conscience, même la souffrance, même le
péché, qui ne vaille mieux que l’insensibilité ou l’indifférence. Car
ce sont encore des marques de l’être et de la vie qui témoignent de la
puissance avec laquelle elle se laisse ébranler. Il ne faut pas chercher à
les abolir, mais à les convertir. On rejette dans le néant tout ce que
l’on retire à la conscience. La conscience la plus grande, la plus riche
et la plus belle est celle qui unifie le plus grand nombre d’élans et purifie
le plus grand nombre de souillures.

>>1600695
>>1600697

What a lot of words to say nothing at all.

>>1600714
Lavelle writes with reality and things, not with words. Of course an illiterate of the Real can't understand anything.
I could spend a month reading and meditating this excerpt and still don't get everything.

>>1600734
>I could spend a month reading and meditating this excerpt and still don't get anything

Fixed that for you. I'm sorry that it hurts your butt, but the mind is no longer the domain of philosophers but of scientists.

>>1600745
It doesn't "hurt my butt" the fact you're an ignorant.
The mind is not the domain of science or philosophy, the mind is only a reality that deserves to be understood.

You don't even seem to understand what philosophy and science are (as if they were two opposite things).

I saw this in a thread yesterday and thought it was interesting.

>If the concept of free will is coherent, then a person can't merely be chemical reactions in the brain. If he were, then he could not freely choose a course of action any more than a rock at the mercy of gravity and friction can choose which way to roll down a hill. If humans are free, then they must have an "immaterial mind" that is the source of their free will that allows them to act without being completely determined by their biological functions.

>>1600768
>a reality that deserves to be understood.

Which we are doing, thru science. What progress has philosophy made since the Greeks?

>>1600779
Why can't some people accept the simple fact humans are an insoluble tension between material/immaterial worlds?
This is what being human is and what differentiates us from animals or gods, and this is what makes us free at all.

>>1600779
>>If the concept of free will is coherent, then a person can't merely be chemical reactions in the brain. If he were, then he could not freely choose a course of action any more than a rock at the mercy of gravity and friction can choose which way to roll down a hill.

No-one chooses freely, only God is unconstrained by reality. The level at which and the degree to which our choices are free is not always obvious but certainly everything in our universe has a cause and all causes fall into an unbreakable recession.

>>1600800
>immaterial

What does this even mean? Nonphysical? Abstract?

>>1600790
Well, I am a normal human being so I understand philosophy is love of widom, and wisdom is something good in itself and what you call "science" doesn't even mean anything without a human being behind it who is searching for some wisdom.

>>1600804
I'd say nonphysical, but that depends on your concept of physis.
Something real but "invisible", that can only be known through reason/imagination.

>>1600838

We can only imagine things based on what we have experienced, and reason is known to not always be reliable. Only the scientific endeavour is self-correcting, if you truly seek truth it is the only place worth looking.

>>1599758
Concepts exist, but concepts are just mental representations of ideas.

For example an impossible shape doesn't actually exist, but the idea of the impossible shape does.

You're confusing existence with the idea of an existence existing.
To be honest, you can't even truly imagine paradox. You imagining an approximation of a paradox that you can understand.

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>This thread
Are philosophers the young earth creationists of academia? jesus fucking christ this thread is painful to read as soon to be M.D who wants to specialize in something psychoendoneuroimmunology related
Seriously go to /x/ or kill your fucking kill yourselves you superstitious retards.
Special mention to the guy who claimed thoughts and dreams are not physical because its just information in your brain, by that logic I can have 50 terabytes of child porn in my computer and get out of jail arguing the digital world is not bound by the laws of physics or men.
THERE IS NO
SUCH THING
AS NON-PHYSICIAL
IF YOU USE THAT WORD
YOU ARE AUTOMATICALLY A SPERG IN THE EYES OF EVERYONE WITH HIGHER THAN 2 DIGITS IQ
Fuck I'm mad.

>>1600850

It looks like you caught a case of scientism.

http://www.randyeverist.com/2011/04/can-science-explain-everything.html

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>>1600800
>Why can't some people accept the simple fact that *insert absolutely ridiculous premise*
Gee I dunno

>>1600850
>We can only imagine things based on what we have experienced
Sure, but imagination is different from perception. You use your imagination to understand things you are not perceiving or can't perceive.

>reason is known to not always be reliable
I don't know if you are using the term "reason" correctly. But reason is what basically defines something as "reliable" or not.
If there's no reason, there's no way to determine something as right or wrong, true or false.

>>1600871

Science can't explain everything but philosophy can't explain anything.

>>1600887

You can't do science at all without philosophy.

>>1600867
>THERE IS NO
>SUCH THING
>AS NON-PHYSICIAL

Right, so show me where the english language is located and how many inches it has.

>>1600886
>I don't know if you are using the term "reason" correctly. But reason is what basically defines something as "reliable" or not.
>If there's no reason, there's no way to determine something as right or wrong, true or false.

And yet physics is full of "reasonable" arguments that have been BTFO by empirical observations. "Physical things have an explicit location" seems reasonable, until you discover the uncertainty principle. Heavy things fall faster" seems reasonable until you do the experiments. Reason is a good first start but only empirical observation can tell you whether or nto your reason is reliable.

>>1600867
Humanities was a mistake.

>>1600895

That's true but the philosophy needed has been done. Science was born from philosophy but it is no longer dependant on it.

>>1600907

This makes no sense.

>>1600904
Wait, since when reason and observation are opposites?
All things obey reason, even physical objects.

>>1600907
Ok, so stay away from philosophy. People like you do not deserve to understand some stuff.

To the people who think consciousness is not a physical process of the brain, please tell me how an unconscious mind could identify inebriation, blood loss, or physical damage that results in errors in the way a brain processes information.

>>1600902
>show me where the english language is located
Right behind your beady intelligence devoid eyes my man.

>>1600895
That's an extremely eurocentrist point of view

>>1600938
Consciousness is not physical in the same way the color blue is not physical.
Actually, colors only exist inside your mind. It doesn't mean it's not real.

>>1601002
You seem to be making a claim that there is some type of barrier between the matter that makes up your brain and data that it processes. This seems unnecessary considering that we already know that data must be represented by matter in order to be processed. Are the electrons flowing through your neurons not matter?

>>1601045
Consciousness is not "data your brain processes". That's the point. Consciousness is not a 'thing', it's an act.

>>1601084
Also, the "thing" that is conscious is the spirit/mind that forms your soul. Only the soul can be aware of anything.

The mind does not exist in the material world. It doesn't even exist in space/time. It's a property reality has and it comes directly from God. It's pure form.

>>1601114
>>/x/
>>/pol/

>>1601002
The color blue is physical. A single "color blue" is a concept (pattern of activation caused by an organization of neurons) in a given brain relating to a certain wavelength of light (photons) and associated with objects that reflect said wavelength (based on the properties of their component molecules). The general "color blue" is a convenient grouping of all these individual brain concepts, plus all photos of that wavelength, plus all objects that reflect that wavelength. Nowhere is there anything mystical or immaterial.

>>1601114

Are you seriously equating spirit with mind?
Are you really that dense?

>>1601122
>structure of reality is the structure of 4chan
>the structure of reality cares if some people are afraid of some words such as God and soul

>>1601125

>The color blue is physical.

Wrong.
Colors are exclusively ideas.
Paints and pigments are not.

>>1601146
Mind and spirit are the exact same thing.

>>1601159

Wrong.

>>1601155
>Colors are exclusively ideas.
Ideas are physical, because they exclusively exist within physical brains (as characteristic patterns of electrical activation and the structure of neural connections, )

>>1601084
>Consciousness is not "data your brain processes".
Why do you think that?
It certainly seems to contain a summary of all of the data generated by the other sections of the brain and nervous system.
Why couldn't it just be a fact checking system for that other data that has been adapted to handle other tasks as well?
Would that system not be organized and controlled by data itself?

>>1601114
>I don't know what it is and I don't care to study it, so it must be magic.

>>1601151
I'm not afraid of shit poor people believe

>>1601169

So you are saying that honesty and dishonesty are physical things and not properties of acts of humans?

>>1601173
>Why do you think that?
Again, because consciousness is not a thing, it is an ACT of your mind.
Maybe you are confusing these two.

Data is some kind of information, this means, something external from your mind that informs your mind. This can only happen because both your mind and objects have the same intellectual properties (ideas).

Mind is not a data, because mind is where you put the data (ideas).

>I don't know what it is and I don't care to study it, so it must be magic
I say that to you. You don't know what I'm saying so you must think I'm talking about "magic".

>>1601194
"Honesty" and "dishonesty" are human concepts (stored, again, as patterns of electrical activity and the shape of neural connections) applied to differentiate certain human actions from others within the context of a brain. While shared definitions exist for the sake of communication and convenience, it would be a mistake to extend that tendency into believing that they have some independent existence. The historical fluidity of those definitions attest to that.

So yes, they are physical things, as all ideas, which are applied to the acts of humans by a brain.

>>1600867
How can you fail this badly to even see the problem? Where are your experiences? They're not in your brain. If you look in my brain you'll see all the physics that coincides with my experiences, but you won't find any of the images I'm seeing. You won't see the feeling of frustration in my brain. You might be able to point at the math and say "this indicates that he is frustrated", but you won't see *the feeling*.

>>1601221
>If you look in my brain you'll see all the physics that coincides with my experiences, but you won't find any of the images I'm seeing. You won't see the feeling of frustration in my brain
I won't see the .jpgs stored on my hard drive by taking a good hard look at it either, but it doesn't mean they aren't there. Unreadable!=Nonexistent

>you won't see *the feeling*
Of course you won't see feelings, you have to feel feelings. If you replicated the state of your brain perfectly in mine, I would feel them exactly as you did.

>>1601206
>Mind is not a data, because mind is where you put the data

This SQL database can't be data, it is where I store data!

>>1601221

These questions are uncomfortable for a lot of people because of the implications. They're close minded atheist.

>>1601274
I believe in God, and still think the idea that our brains are some type of gateway to another dimension is horseshit. It seems like ideas that were developed before we had any knowledge of information theory.

>>1601274
Conversely with the first reply, I'm an atheist and I'm the one who made that comment.

>>1601254
>you have to feel the feelings.
Welcome to the point. The "physical" description of the event is not complete. You're missing a key component. That component is the mental property of that part of "physical" reality. What you call the "physical" world is a description of the properties you notice by virtue of their mental effects.

>>1601869
What stops those feelings from just being physical states of the brain as viewed from inside the processes of that brain?

I highly recommend you learn about the field of computation, as I feel it would help your philosophy immensely.

>>1601928
I'm also a panpsychist.

>>1601928
I also do study computation. But you say viewed from the inside as though that eliminates the separate consciousness feature. The fact that they can be viewed from the inside at all is exactly the feature I'm describing

>>1601928
Let me also expand. Any region of the brain going through a conscious state is also going through a certain electromagnetic state with an electromagnetic description. That space will also have a gravitational description within the gravitational field. The mental description is the only one accessible to you directly. The fact that that description structurally, and therefore computationally, mirrors the physical description in someway is what allows for the mental description to provide information about the physical description.

>>1601965
>I'm also a panpsychist
>In philosophy, panpsychism is the view that consciousness, mind or soul (psyche) is a universal and primordial feature of all things
I don't believe that. I believe minds are an emergent property of sufficiently advanced computational systems.

>>1601970
>But you say viewed from the inside as though that eliminates the separate consciousness feature
If the brain's processes are physical, and your mind is a result of those processes, then your mind is physical also. Highly encoded and currently impossible to read directly, but still physical in nature.

>>1601979
>The mental description is the only one accessible to you directly
Only by virtue of there being no interface for which another person could tap into the data flowing through my brain.

Are you claiming that data itself is a completely different substance than that which makes up the rest of reality?
Data is indistinguishable from matter until placed within a device that can process it.

>>1599433
As consciousness we live in a world of descriptions, symbols - definitions and values which are real only inside the brain.

The objective world contains this consciousness and its laws totally allow for it to be and manifest.

Consciousness for us in this phase is dependent on brain and being alive - so if you die consciousness is gone - if you damage your brain consciousness is altered.

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>>1600973

kek

This whole thread is like reading a series of fucking posts written by American STEM undergraduates. SCIENCE MEANS POSITIVISM. THERE IS AN EXTERNAL WORLD AND MY SENSORY EXPERIENCES OF IT UNCOVER THAT REALITY.

WHY SHOULD I HAVE HEARD ABOUT KUHN OR RORTY OR BHASKAR? PHILOSOPHY IS FUCKING OBSOLETE KEKEKEKEKEKE

>>1602277
>le philosopher

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>>1602299
What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in Paris Sorbonne, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret co-authored publications against dogmatic positivists, and I have over 300 journal articles to my name. I am trained in deconstruction by Deleuze himself and I’m the postmodernist thinker in the entire European academic scene. You are nothing to me but just another piece of scum to dismiss with my pen. I will wipe you the fuck out with a condescending critique the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. etc.

>>1601869
>evolved to take in sensory information
>brain stores and categorizes the information based on genetics and without conscious effort
>as more information comes in the categorization begins to depend on previously stored information

The "mental property" you suggest is simply the subjective retrieval of information. Because our neurons are vastly and deeply interconnected, many chains of neurons can be set off when retrieving information, sparking other related or even unrelated ideas. This unique retrieval is the quality you suggest, and is a physical description of qualia.

>>1602277
Yeah, like, what evidence can you give to someone to value evidence if they don't value evidence in the first place.

>>1602010
>le spooky emergent property

>>1602533
It's not spooky. Just complex.

>>1599433
Consciousness is what it feels like to be a really complicated, self-aware, biologically evolved chemical computer and robot. It is physical, just like everything else.

The simplest evidence for this is that we can manipulate, and even temporarily eliminate, consciousness through physical means, including drugs (both medical and recreational), physical injury, surgery, and electrical and magnetic stimulation. More than that, we've localized certain parts of our consciousness to certain parts of the brain. If we can interact with consciousness in so many physical ways while side-stepping the lens of our senses, how could it be non-physical?

Perhaps the physical brain is an important part of consciousness, but not the only part?

If the physical brain interacts with the non-physical part of consciousness, then why haven't we been able to measure it? If something happening in the non-physical consciousness can cause a physical neuron to fire, then we should be able to exploit it. In fact, it pretty much makes the non-physical part of consciousness physical. Imagine if when we discovered radio waves we found out that 500MHz will cause anyone exposed to fall unconscious, then went on to discover that 500MHz is the frequency the brain uses to talk to our consciousness. I imagine we'd keep researching it until consciousness was no more non-physical than neutrinos. We haven't discovered anything like this, or even any gap in our understanding that such a phenomenon would fill.

>>1602551
(Cont)

So maybe the universe takes special care to make sure consciousness only interacts with human brains, and not other mammals or any instruments we invent.

A fetus starts with a single sperm and egg cell, and eventually develops into a human. If consciousness were non-physical, yet not exist in, say, shrimp and bacteria, then the universe would need to be able to differentiate between humans and others animals, as well as between "fetus" and "proper human". This falls apart when you step through it slowly. If there's a line to cross in either fetal development or evolutionary history, before which everything is physical and after which brains start to interact with consciousness, then it means we're back to the previous case, where there's a physical construct we could discover, study, and pick apart that would enable us to interact with and measure the "non-physical" consciousness.

Really, non-physical consciousness doesn't make much sense. What does "non-physical" even mean? If it means it can't be interacted with by physical means, then it certainly can't interact with our physical brains. And if it can't interact at all with the universe we live in, then for all intents and purposes it doesn't exist.

>>1602538
>g-g-guys just trust me, I'd explain how unrelated properties magically spawn from other each other in complete violation of the laws of identity, b-but it's just too complex for you brainlets to handle. Just believe me, ok?

>>1602583
It's not magic, it's organization. The properties of a house can not be explained by looking at wood, steel, glass, insulation etc in isolation, only by combining them in specific ways. There's nothing spooky about conciousness any more than a house is spooky.

>>1602583
>we currently can't explain it
>therefore it will be forever unexplained

Just wait a decade or two. Consciousness is an engineering problem and computational power will soon reach the needed strength to model it.

>>1602583
>unrelated properties magically spawn from other each other in complete violation of the laws of identity
None of the components of a car will pick me up and carry me down the road independently. It is only when they are assembled in a very complex pattern does the emergent property of 'vehicle' come around.

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>>1602594
I dunno man, some houses...

>>1602599
No it's not. If you really believe in reductionism, there's no reason to ever believe consciousness will be scientifically explained, because there's no reason to believe in conscious experiences.

>>1602663
Why would someone be a strict reductionist if they mention emergent properties?

>>1602663
>because there's no reason to believe in conscious experiences
I fail to see how believing that there is a mechanical explanation for the computation the brain undertakes to produce the mind means that the mind can't have experiences that those processes would be aware of.

>>1602705
Many people just mean "non-obvious" or "non-intuitive" when they say "emergent".

Ie, self-replicating patterns are an "emergent" property of Conway's Game of Life.

ITT
>It's a coincidence that our best intelligent machines are based on a simplified mathematical model of neurons. Surely they'll never develop consciousness!
>Humans have consciousness but chimpanzees don't, obviously god blessed us some time between our most recent common ancestor and now.
>Theories with no predictive power and tons of evidence against them vs. theories than underpin modern medicine, computation, and physics with new evidence discovered every day.

>>1602722
And if you have the other meaning of "emergent" you're basically saying 'lol, magic.'

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>>1602530

>This table is real because I can touch it.

>I can touch the table because it is real.

>This table is real.

mfw epistemology is fallaciously used to justify an ontological position and the STEM plebs don't even know what they're doing

>>1602600
A car is a concept that is physically reducible to its parts. The sensation of seeing the color red is not reducible to anything we have currently recognized or catalogued in physics. It's not a conceptual object of a group of other more fundamental things.

>>1602857
That's called "failure of the imagination".

Everybody in this thread failed 3rd grade English. Coherent statements can't contain I/me/you.

So PLEASE stop falling for this troll that exploits your lack of linguistic understanding.

>>1602886
I'm pretty sure if statements containing "I/me/you" are incoherent to you, you're the one who should revisit third grade English.

>>1602857
>The sensation of seeing the color red is not reducible to anything we have currently recognized or cataloged in physics
It is. The color red is a value in the processes of your consciousness that represents the perception of a specific wave length of light by your eyes. Your consciousness represents that value to you via the color that you perceive as red. Since the color red is just a value in your consciousness, you can even reproduce it in your imagination without the use of outside stimuli by merely thinking about what that value 'looks like'.
That value is composed of electrons in patterns of neurons. All matter, all explainable, no spookiness required.

>>1599641
>potentially not possible to measure
This is literally a paradox. You can't say it's impossible to acquire information about something, because the statement itself is information about it.

>>1602866
If you think you can even begin to attempt to reduce phenomenal experience in terms of conventional physical matter and energy, be my guest you've probably got some Nobel prizes waiting for you. Until then, you're just waving le ad hoc spooky wand.

>>1602902
What evidence is there of "phenomenal experience"?

>>1602900
Not being able to measure something is not a measurment of that thing. You do know measurement is, right anon?

>>1602912
If it can't be measured, where did the idea come from in the first place?

>>1602910
It's literally right in front of your eyes dawg. Maybe you're a p-zombie though.

>>1602916

You're literally looking at it.

>>1602923
So then some mechanism of physical human anatomy can measure it. That settles that.

>>1602902
>even begin
We began thousands of years ago, and have picked up the pace quite a bit in the last 200.

We've built computers that learn using mathematical models of neurons, we've developed drugs that can make you experience "phenomenal" things by physically interacting with your brain, we've localized our senses, our emotions, and many aspects of memory, language, and other parts of consciousness to specific sections of the brain.

What have we discovered in the last thousand years that "even begins" to show that consciousness can't be reduced to physics?

>>1602920
>p-zombie
How would a p-zombie know if he his high on acid? How would he be able to tell if his perception of colors was getting messed up and not the entire world?
It seems like it would require a mind that was aware of its own processes to recognize this.

>>1602930
No we can observe it, we can create symbolic language out of it, but we can't measure it. Do you know measurement means anon? It bears repeating.

>>1602920
By "phenomenal experience", are we talking about the idea that being is constrained to the physical space of a human body?

>>1602935
because the changes to sensory input are physical

>>1602955
It's an synonym for the word "observe".

>>1602934
>>1602902
To elaborate a bit, imagine we were having this argument in 3000 BC.

Back then, I'd have trouble defending all my points. I could still say "doesn't impacting the movement of my arm mean that it must be physical, for my arm is physical, and what is physicality if not moving the physical?" or something like that.

But you might say "but how can it be physical, nothing I've seen in the world can reproduce it, alone or in combination".

And that'd be that.

Fast forward five thousand years and I can point at the evolutionary history of the brain, our understanding of the differences between our brains, the brains of other mammals, and the brains of other animals. I can point to drugs, machine learning, transcranial electromagnetic stimulation, lobotomy and other psychosurgery. I can point to the parts of the brain we do understand, and the development of the brain from fetus to adult.

And what more can you say than you could have said in 3000BC?

Not much. It's a "god of the gaps" issue, and in the future all the juicy gaps will close.

>>1602955
If you can press a button when you observe something, you can measure it (poorly). "Measure" just means "impact something in a way we can record".

>>1602934
Nope. You're almost entirely referencing thinking (the 'soft problem' stuff), not phenomenal experience.

>dudeweed

Drugs don't alter qualia they alter the conventional physical parts of your brain which only in turn alter qualia. This doesn't mean we can reduce qualia to anything it only means something that isn't controversial and no disagrees with; qualia correspond and correlate to other physical properties, as if they another type of fundamental property embedded into matter/energy like mass or inertia.

>>1602989
How would the behavior of a human change if he or she did not have qualia?

>>1602989
I'll concede that none of what I said is "proof", but surely it is evidence. That is to say, isn't it more likely the brain is purely physical in a world where cutting out parts of the brain impacts your perception than in a world where cutting out parts of the brain doesn't impact perception at all?

The same goes for drugs, neural networks, etc.

Can you give me any evidence that the brain /isn't/ purely physical? Can you give me any evidence we didn't have 100 years ago?

>>1602982
No measure means to quantify and relate one thing in terms of another. There is nothing to our current knowledge to which phenomenal experience can be quantifably related. There is no unit of color.

In other words, a given shade of red contains x units of what exactly?

>>1603023
Neutral impulses similar to the ones you get when the red-sensitive cones are simulated more than the others.

>>1603023
>There is no unit of color.
Because the sensation that your brain approximates colors to is completely arbitrary.
Any of the colors you can perceived could have been swapped with each other at birth and your life would have turned out no differently.
>In other words, a given shade of red contains x units of what exactly?
Bits

>>1603033
Neutral->neural
Simulated->stimulated
(On phone)

>>1603023
x nanometers of length.
The experience of red contains y activation pattern, measurable through electrical recordings or glucose tracking etc.

>>1602999
As in if I waved a magic stick and stripped the phenomenal properties out of a person's brain? I would expect they would drop to floor and never move again (except for somatic activities or whatever)

By using the word "consciousness", you have already shut out the answers because you chose a term that makes false assumptions.

>>1602989
Qualia is just an emergent property of the interconnected way information is stored in the brain. It can be described as a group of associated ideas and sensations. A person's arrangements of neurons representing an idea or object are going to be interconnected with other ideas unique to them, so of course qualia differ between people.

It can't be a fundamental property, as it is a direct result of the way each brain stores memories.

>>1603049
You're measuring things to which it generally corresponds to, not the thing itself. I'm sure I could measure something's mass and calculate its gravitational pull because we understand the correspondence between those two things, but they are different things and I have not actually measure the gravitational pull.

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Here's an easy test to see whether or not somebody is full of shit.

>>1603078
I don't care if I exist, I only care that something functionally equivalent to myself exists. Who's to say I'm not disintegrated and reconstructed between each step I take?

>>1603076
No, the thing red itself is very literally the nanometer wavelength of the photon, and the experience of the thing itself is the pattern of activation. Changing either of them changes the amount of "red" experienced.

>>1603078
What is this meant to prove?

>>1603078
Whether this disturbs you or not depends on if you consider yourself your meat or the data contained within your meat.

>>1603068
>1603068
Which 'group of things' in your brain create the sensation of redness when placed in proximity to one another? I don't need any sort of technically correct answer just a rough simplified example for the sake of demonstrating the principal.

>>1603092
Whether or not somebody believes in unique immaterial identities that for some reason only apply to humans.

>>1603090
No, light waves are the physical property of a type of information available in the environment and we've evolved to correspond a selection of that information into a symbolic language in our heads to use it to navigate and survive. Light is not color.

>>1603121
>Light is not color
It is in your brain.
It's rather dark in there, so it has to be represented abstractly through sensational equivalencies.

>>1603111
>immaterial identities
A materialist could be just as disturbed, given that the system composing them is destroyed/disturbed. It would be like experiencing normal death, then getting cloned decades later. The individual still dies, and the copy is their own subjective individual also.

I don't know.
We're the creators of this universe yet could just as easily be without.
Such a tragic beauty is yet to be found.

>>1603121
Color is a convinent way of referring to specific ranges of light wavelengths. If color at all "exists", it is in the interaction between wavelengths of light and neurons.

>>1603094
The sensation is created by relationships between encoded associations within your brain.

Even before you are consciously aware of sensing the color red, the signal from your eye has already visited your visual cortex and stimulated linked pathways to associated experiences and associated emotions to the color.

>>1603078
This shouldn't disturb you any more than sleeping.
We all die every night.

>>1603134
>The individual still dies, and the copy is their own subjective individual also.
How is that NOT implying something immaterial?

>>1601221
>Where are your experiences? They're not in your brain.
Says who ? I can actually prove you wrong, you have to volunteer to have your hippocampus removed though, if you are too much of a pussy to test your faith you can read about Henry Molaison.
>If you look in my brain you'll see all the physics that coincides with my experiences, but you won't find any of the images I'm seeing.
In theory you could, we can actually partially do this when you are asleep there is even a Doctor House episode about this.
>You won't see the feeling of frustration in my brain. You might be able to point at the math and say "this indicates that he is frustrated", but you won't see *the feeling*.
Muh feelings is not an argument.
KYS ignoramus
>>1601274
They are not uncomfortable they are just retarded.

>>1603165
Subjectivity does not imply immaterial, it just means each system is relatively self contained. If you were to put the original and the clone together in a room, each would have the experience of seeing the other. But this wouldn't be the same experience, it would be two extremely similar experiences occurring in two extremely similar systems, but separate from each other. You could do the same thing by connecting two otherwise-identical computers together. Each would have their own connection/recognition event, and destroying one would still destroy all the information contained within it.

Subjectivity isn't spooky.

>>1603165
Because there'd be two individuals (who would start identical and quickly diverge) if you'd instead skipped the "destroy" part and just made a copy.

>>1602739
Let me fixt that for you
ITT
>Dumbass philosophers vs normal human beings

Without making any potentially false assumptions, describe the phenomena that the word "consciousness" is suppose to be referring to.

>>1599679
>animals aren't concious
I have no idea why people say this. It makes absolutely no sense. Dogs, as well as many other creatures, have displayed a theory of mind. They're not wind up toys made of meat.

>>1603234
We're all wind up toys made of meat.

>>1603214
A process in the brain where signals from various other processes in the brain are sent to be combined and analyzed.

>>1603239
I take offence to that.
We are sophisticated enough to at least be considered meat robots.

>>1603240
You are describing a computer.

>>1603234
Generally when people use the word "consciousness," they're using it to say the word soul. Animals don't have souls, therefore they don't have consciousness, despite all evidence to the contrary.

>>1603254
They are very similar in their basic operation.
Explain the difference to me between an activated neuron and a switched transistor.

>>1603214
A signal self reference contained in a feedback loop.

Do any of you "the mind is non-physical" people have any predictions about the future?

For instance, I think we'll eventually be able to project dreams onto normal computer displays.

I predict we'll be able to integrate a calculator intuitively into a human brain, such that just recognizing an arithmetic expression brings the solution to mind. And by this I don't just mean "projects it in your vision like a heads up display", I mean "brings it to mind in sort of the same way the symbol pi brings to mind 3.14...", much more like a memory than an image. Note that I'm making a prediction about the subjective experience of such a brain implant, something some might say is "non-physical".

Perhaps if I believed the mind was non-physical I might say "we'll find a way to swap two people's non-physical minds", as an example.

Any takers? Predicting the future is the best tool we have for determining the truth, after all.

>>1603258
What exactly do people perceive that leads to the idea of a "soul"?

>>1603274
We should just jump to the part of the conversation where you say "*tips fedora*", so I'll say it's tradition born from incomplete information.

>>1603147
>The sensation is created by relationships between encoded associations within your brain.

You're begging the question. 'created by relationships' doesn't mean anything other than what I'm asking you to explain in the first place.

>>1603282
Have you forgotten how to use normal words instead of memes?

>>1603264
Consciousness is not unique; every measured instance of consciousness is the same one. And this statement doesn't actually make sense because the term "consciousness" carries incorrect assumptions, which is why this is impossible to discuss.

>>1603285
The physiological sensation of color? There must be a close relationship of the visual cortex to the hippocampus resulting in unconscious physical responses throughout the body which might then result in conscious appraisal of the emotion. Arguably a large part of qualia.

Or the sensation of conscious awareness of the color? Visual stimulation excites neuron pathways associated with the color viewed, resulting in evoked memories and emotions.

These are all groups of neurons. None contain the subjective experience by themselves, but as an interconnected group they do.

>>1603285
He means physical connections between neurons, and their tendency to trigger each other (which is governed by physics).

Consider "priming": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)

A great example of priming is the "What does a cow drink?" joke.

"Say "silk" five times."
>silk silk silk silk silk
"What do cows drink?"
>milk

People will respond "milk" even though they'd normally answer "water" because the word "silk" used some of the same parts of your brain that are used for the word "milk". Then later, when you hear the question "what do cows drink?", the "milk" possibility comes back first instead of the normal answer "water" because those pathways were recently used.

>>1603334
Can you make any predictions, though? Something that'd be true about the future if you're right, and not true about the future if you're wrong.

For instance, if I'm wrong, and it turns out my experience in a dream is non-phyiscal, then my prediction will be wrong. We won't be able to project a recording of my dream onto a computer screen, no matter how well we measure my brain. We'd only see all my individual memories, perhaps, but the way I assemble it all into a contiguous experience would be non-physical.

Or in the calculator example, if I'm wrong, it might turn out that there's no place in the mind we can insert electrical signals that'll cause the perception of specific numbers, and the best we can do is alter vision or sound or another sense and to make us see or hear the numbers. Because the perception of numbers is "non-physical", we'd only be able to mess with our senses.

>>1603383
>We won't be able to project a recording of my dream onto a computer screen
WE
CAN
DO
THIS
IN
2016
For fucks sake you are not a special snowflake that defies the laws of physics
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22031074

>>1603438
>reading comprehension

I was predicting that we'd be able to do it, read the previous two posts.

And wow! That's not great accuracy or fidelity, but I'm glad to see we're on the right track.

>>1603383
A human brain or a replica of one will be observed to behave as though it has access to information it has no way of accessing.

>>1603473
So let me get this straight: you believe you are correct, and also believe that nothing that nothing anybody could ever hypothetically do could prove you wrong?

>>1603500
What? I'm just stating a prediction like what was asked.

>>1603536
Oh, I see. Sorry, I misread what you wrote. I thought you meant "a brain or replica of a brain will be observed to be the same as if it didn't have access to anything non-physical". Stumbled on "access to information it has no way of accessing".

So you'd predict that if we made an particle-by-particle perfect copy of a person, and smacked one of them, the other might flinch? Or something like that?

I want to get a better idea of exactly the type of non-physical component you think exists.

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>>1599433
Materialist answers for consciousness are typically analogous to someone looking at a computer and telling you that the monitor is the reality of the computer. That's all there is.

Your active consciousness, thoughts/experiences, and the thing from which these thoughts and experiences are disseminated (if you'd like to call it the sub-conscious, you can do so, though it feels inaccurate). Your thoughts are an apple falling in the face of gravity. In the same way that the text that one writes is teleologically and ontologically subordinate to one's "consciousness", the text of the mind is as well. It is like a great sphere rolling along a flat surface: your active participation in the process as you understand it is the point of contact. Consciousness, or the Self, cannot be understood as your phenomenological experience of your Self is of a magnitudinously subordinate nature. You can no more understand consciousness than you can swallow your own skull.

Linguistically, this is represented by deconstruction, by the inability of language to convey meaning—ultimately this is due to text's (in all forms physical and not) inability to accurately describe qualia as a consequence of having a subordinate teleology and ontology. We also see this in our understanding of physics, for example, with our scientific inability to convey the existential quality of black holes (the Horizon Mass Theorem really throws things into a loop, as black holes exist despite literally no matter passing through the event horizon—not even upon initial creation; this oddly suggests that the "surface" of a black hole is indistinguishable from the singularity [which is topologically acceptable due to the intense bending of space and time]). Attempting to understand greater realities utilizing text, i.e. symbols (language/thoughts) is going to end in fundamental disaster as text is subordinate to qualia, which is in itself subordinate to Self.

>>1603590
>our scientific inability to convey the existential quality of black holes (the Horizon Mass Theorem really throws things into a loop, as black holes exist despite literally no matter passing through the event horizon—not even upon initial creation; this oddly suggests that the "surface" of a black hole is indistinguishable from the singularity [which is topologically acceptable due to the intense bending of space and time])

Not commenting on anything else, but dude, give science a chance. We haven't even been able to get anywhere near a black hole - nearly all of astrophysics is based solely on our observations of photons that enter our solar system.

That makes running experiments really fucking hard. When you have a theory you want to test, you just have to look out into the sky and hope you'll be able to find a pair of pulsars orbiting a extra massive black hole or something. And yet, even with the fact that we have to purely observe space, and only get to run experiments on Earth, and even though we've unable to produce many of the exotic conditions of astronomical objects, we've discovered an incredible amount, and made some amazing predictions.

Give it a hundred years and I bet black holes will be a lot less mysterious.

>>1603569
Humans have this sense of "will"; a sense of something being involved in the motion of objects. It is misunderstood and that's where the idea of free will comes from. What causes this misunderstanding is that any individual human will sense the will within their own body, then mistakenly assume that it's ONLY in their body. From there, they may assume that a unique version of it exists in every body. This is all unnecessarily complicated and it's more reasonable to conclude that it's everywhere, but the senses of a human aren't strong enough to perceive it beyond their own body.

Now the question is, what does being able to sense the will through an object do? It makes it feel a part of you, but what does THAT mean? We could say that intentional motions are ones that are expected, so seeing the will through something lets you see its future.

This cross of time and distance results in every part of a will-sensitive body feeling infinitely close together, and all part and future iterations being connected as well.

>>1603590
>Materialist answers for consciousness are typically analogous to someone looking at a computer and telling you that the monitor is the reality of the computer. That's all there is.
That's a bad analogy.
Spiritualistic answers for consciousness are typically analogous to someone looking at a computer screen and telling you that nobody knows how it works but it just does.
The materialistic point of view is slapping that imbecile in the back of his head and pointing the input cable plugged to a computer
>All that flowery language to get the simple message of "its too complex for me to understand so therefore I deem it impossible to understand"
You must think you're clever and educated.
Textbook example of a pseudo intellectual.

>>1603624
Only humans, though? Not any other animals?

>>1603636
Who knows. It's already weak to the point of being nearly unnoticeable in humans, which is where the misunderstandings come from. The amount of influence "intention" has on our actions is quite minuscule. It's why the types of meditation meant to exercise that ability are so difficult.

>>1603647
But you're confident it doesn't exist in bacteria?

>>1603657
Can't say anything for sure unless we know how it's sensed in the first place. The fundamental nature of it means that systems with a certain kind of complexity might just accumulate spookiness. Like every particle interaction has a very tiny amount of spooky, but the way human cells are arranged causes the spooky from all these particles to bunch up together. Bacteria could have it to a very small degree because all living organisms share a lot.

>>1603622
Well Horizon Mass Theorem, which I know is new but I've talked it over with professors since I came to similar conclusions myself (obvious bias, but still), is more on the theoretical side of things. There's just, as of now, paradoxical fundamentalities to black holes. I've never personally been a fan of any theory that maps out the "inside" of a black hole (and of course there's no way to test that), but as you probably know doing the math without entertaining the notion of the inside of a black hole results in nonsense results. The event horizon is a single point if you do that, and the black hole forms seemingly without impetus as it goes against the classical idea of matter collapsing "within" the Schwarzchild radius as there is no radius.

I'm sure science will continue to expand our knowledge; my supposition is simply that the search for Laplace's Demon tier knowledge is literally impossible due to the inability of symbols to accurately represent reality to that level. Einstein developed GR through the textual representation of his ideas (i.e. qualia, Einstein wasn't a machine punching numbers but instead had an understanding beyond symbols that could then be interpreted [but thereby imperfected] into text); it is obviously amazing, but was attacked on the basis of having portions that made no sense if you looked at it hard enough. This, in my opinion, is not the fault of theories in themselves but our transmission of those theories being through a medium far below the requirements to accurately describe these things. I do personally find Deconstruction to be connected to mathematic and scientific conundrums/paradoxes, and also believe it connects to a good deal of other things touched on by philosophers and theologians. It's just a fact of our phenomenological existences.

>>1603632
If you think the message was "it's too complex!" you did not understand what I said. It's not flowery language; it's specific terminology. Text is fallible.

>>1603685
Can you imagine a simple test that would prove you wrong?

For instance, maybe when an animal dies, and in particular when the brain is destroyed, the spookiness decreases because the arrangement of physical particles is broken. If you could seal someone in a room, kill or not kill a bunch of animals outside it, and have them reliably tell you if you'd done it or not with repeated trials, I'd accept that I was wrong.

>>1603697
ESP has already been tested and it has been concluded that nothing practical can come of it until a mechanism is proposed. Without that, you are just going off statistics, which is laughable.

>>1603685
Look, if you're going to do spooky, then it'd be a ubiquitous Spook Field or something. There'd be no "spook accumulation", it's simply interaction with a field. Like gravity (unless you're a gravitons pleb).

>>1603691
>my supposition is simply that the search for Laplace's Demon tier knowledge is literally impossible due to the inability of symbols to accurately represent reality to that level.
Well I agree with you there, that's definitely not the entirety of your supposition, since

>Einstein wasn't a machine punching numbers but instead had an understanding beyond symbols that could then be interpreted
I don't agree with that (though I might disagree with the connotations of your wording).

You might be interested in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems

and in particular "uncomputable numbers": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_number

I agree that it's extremely unlikely we'll ever be able to predict the universe in perfect accuracy from inside, and it may even be that the true laws of the universe cannot be represented by any finite string of symbols (see uncomputable numbers). But I don't think this means anything particularly important about human consciousness.

>>1603729
I'm not exactly sure what you mean. If the animal test actually demonstrated that people could sense death through solid steel, sound dampening, faraday cages, etc (which I highly doubt), that'd pretty much prove ESP to me. The least-spooky thing we could discover would be that there's a new type of field that many animal brains take advantage of, which is definitely ESP, even if it doesn't prove non-physicality.

>>1603730
I shouldn't say that spook accumulates, since the spook field is a part of everything. It's that certain shapes are more conductive to the influence of the spook field; that the little nudges resonate and become noticeable on the macro scale.

>>1603744
There is nothing special about an animal dying that would be easier to sense. There have been tests with remote viewing that produced results that were interesting enough to look into(you've probably heard of stargate project before), but the lack of mechanism meant it couldn't go anywhere.

>>1603790
>There is nothing special about an animal dying that would be easier to sense.
That's fine, it'd still pretty much prove me wrong if it turned out to be true. Again, I might be able to say it is actually just a new, normal, physical sense that we didn't know about yet. But we could continue looking into it, and if it turns out there's no way to replicate it (no way to build a non-human machine that could similarly detect the animal deaths, for example), then I'd accept that it was a special thing about life, or thinking, willfull, organisms and not something governed by conventional physics.

Can you think of a similar sort of simple test, something we could actually do, that would prove you wrong?

>>1603735
Well, okay, I mean we're probably coming from different schools here but thanks for being cool, Anon.

Basically, the reason I think it's important for human consciousness is that what we commonly consider our consciousness is a sliver of what could be called Self. There's a conflation with the phenomenology of perception (on both the textual and qualia level) as being consciousness, but I personally believe there to be an order above which current conceptions of the "subconscious" fail to accurately represent. Right now it's usually represented as something "under the surface", and as I hoped to get across with my varying examples, I think that misunderstands the relationship. And I also think there's a conflation with perception and reality. Again, these are all personal beliefs. So, I simply believe it to be naive to say that consciousness is "nothing more than chemicals and electricity". A materialist view places perception over reality, imo.

And what I meant with Einstein is that I'm relatively certain that he had an innate understanding of his theory. Symbols get applied later. I think "intuition" is a poor word choice here, but it's that ineffable reality that math attempts to describe, I think. On a literal level, a mathematic representation of a theory represents nothing. To someone with no understanding of math, GR is meaningless. To an unenthused grad student punching in numbers, they can put in variables and get out numbers. To people who have a deeper understanding, you can start to see/experience in your mind the field interactions of massive objects, with or without the math. And to Einstein and those amazing world-best tier physicists, I think there's a deep and fundamental understanding and they can boil it down into beautiful text. I think what great mathematicians and scientists do is exactly the same thing, say, Wordsworth does in "Tintern Abbey" by using text to describe nature and meaning. Just with different subjects.

>>1603809
These ideas are old and what was possible to test has already been tested. And I never meant to imply the sense had to be exclusive to living organisms.

The most relevant thing is that this provides a more logical idea of what "will" is than the common view, which essentially views it as souls.

>>1603830
>Well, okay, I mean we're probably coming from different schools here but thanks for being cool, Anon.
No problem, I love discussion. Picking apart an idea, clarifying definitions, working examples, etc. When you truly come to a mutual understanding with someone, when you find the smallest set of fundamental disagreements, to me, that's like sharing a part of your soul.

I don't think I'll have time tonight, though.

>>1603855
>These ideas are old and what was possible to test has already been tested.
I disagree.

Consider if in a few minutes, after reflecting on this conversation, the world goes black around you. A floating image appears in front of you, of a man at a computer. He speaks: "Wow, thanks! I think we finally got it, we finally got that last piece of consciousness figured out. In accordance with the Rights for New Sentience act, you have the right to choose between ceasing to exist (us erasing you), implantation into a robot body, or continuing to exist only virtually. The answers to any questions you might have will come to you."

It's a pretty fundamental belief of mine that you should be very very careful of any beliefs you have that you can't think of a way to disprove. And ideally with a better test than than "well we could try creating life in a simulation using technology we don't have".

A personal theory I have about consciousness is, regardless of what consciousness IS in and of itself, it's sort of almost impossible to die. If you were to stop perceiving, all of time itself would seem as an instant until the moment that you perceive again. It's a more objective take on reincarnation, I guess. That when we die we just warp to our new birth because all that time that we return to the chaos of objective atomization and nothingness and then eventually inevitability through sheer mathematics of infinity get put back together again would appear as an instant as we didn't perceive it. Consciousness and reality is nothing but perception and you simply cannot NOT perceive, because the moment you stop perceiving, you don't perceive infinitely until the inevitable moment that you perceive again. Sorry I'm drunk but does that make sense? idk.

>>1603956
If anything, that's an argument against the idea of there being individual "perspectives".

Also since people were talking about black holes, I won't pretend that I'm intensely scientifically educated or anything like that, I'm really not, but what makes the most sense to me is that black holes are just singularities. They aren't portals to other places or wormholes to other dimensions, they're just extremely, extremely, incomprehensibly dense particles. And that eventually, after god could only imagine how many years, all of the roaming black holes throughout the universe absorb all matter, meet eachother, and combine to become the initial singularity that is the birth of the next universe. It just sounds like common sense to me

>>1603975
The idea I have to explain this is that
keep in mind this is not something I believe in and of itself but just one of many things that could possibly explain the phenomenon of consciousness and the existence that I'm experiencing because it literally makes no sense to me that i'm here right now in this moment experiencing this but
basically this life that I'm living right now, could, potentially, be the last one. At the end of this life I'll become the objective infinity of the prospect of infinity, "God" as it were.
It kinda just stems from some post I saw on 4chan years ago where a guy had this story about a guy dying and meeting god and god told him that he was everyone to ever exist and when he had eventually lived out all lives he would become god himself
that always really intrigued me and imo could possibly be reality with the recent theories that we all live all lives simultaneously
Maybe this subjective viewpoint I have right now is the end of that phenomenon running it's course

>>1603939
I agree. It's, I think, a fundamental want to be able to convey one's self, and to have another's conveyed to you. I've always found 4chan to a be great place for little moments like that. Have a good night, Anon.

>>1604007
I think it's less YOU become God, but more that the "Spook Field" you're going through will stop interacting with you when you die. "You" are not a part of God. You are a vessel for God. Everyone is partaking in the same Spook Field, anyone who ever lived has. There's some connection there. Does that mean YOU return to it at death? If the Spook Field theory is true, (and mind you guys in this thread that Spook Field is LITERALLY monotheistic theology on the ubiquity of God), then what you identify as "you" will cease to exist at death. Instead, there is just One, the Spook Field, or God/Godhead. It would be Ego Death no matter what.

I don't necessarily believe this, but that is what this theory is best described as. Spook Field/Ubiquitous God. In another perspective it's reincarnation, if you want it to be, but it's easiest to look at it holistically.

>>1604056
I've never heard the term Spook Field before I'm sorry but I think I get what you're saying and that's kinda what I was going for

that when I die I'll return to the humanly incomprehendable sensation that is experiencing infinity

The only thing that clashes with this is that I also kind of believe that nothing exists. I have a weird duality belief ((im probably crazy)) that nothing and everything exist simultaneously, overlaid on top of one-another. Nothing exists but our perception, but our perception is subjective and therefore exists to none but ourselves. Everything that is ever perceived subjectively exists, but NOTHING objectively exists, and when I die I'll return to that state. It's sort of like quantum mechanics? Or schrodingers cat? That merely observing something changes the outcome, and in some cases, forces a decision to be made, and that when I die I'll return to the hyper state that is nothing and everything at once. That that's what my consciousness will be like, I'll see everything and nothing at the same time. Sort of how when you close your eyes there's not just blackness, but rather an infinite amount of millions of colors on top of the blackness, yet not really there. It'll be like that but in every sense that could ever exist simultaneously. Trillions of things quantumly half-existing on top of a void. That's what i think the universe is. Everything pretending to exist on top of nothing. I have no clue lol I'm kind of guessing that none of this makes sense to anyone but me.

>>1604056
There is no "return". Nothing comes from anything or returns to anything. The expression just deteriorates at some points.

>>1604139
>There is no "return"
Well this is what I was trying to get at.

>Nothing comes from anything or returns to anything
Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, you're jumping the ontological gun on that one, I think. I mean, mass can return to energy. And with enough energy, separated forces can return to unified forces.

>>1604099
I definitely see what you're saying, but I disagree personally with nothing existing outside our perception. What is true is that what we perceive to exist does not; it would exist in an entirely different way that may not even "exist" as we perceive existence to act. It's weird shit. You're not crazy. Searching out for your own truths and putting them through the ringer is great.

Sounds kind of like Holographic Universe theory. You could look into that.

You should also look into LSD if you haven't done it before.

>>1604192
the only drug I've done is weed, and even after smoking on a regular basis, one particular night I took 3 bong hits, which is nowhere near anything and extreme and something that plenty of smokers take on the reg, and I was literally having a panic attack in front of all of my friends about the cold objective nature of the universe and saying that I "had eldritch knowledge now" and could feel cold fingers tingling on the back of my neck

I don't know and haven't heard of anyone reacting to such a normal amount of weed in that way so like I don't know
i'm not saying i'm crazy anymore I guess but I'm fuckin somethin

I really want to do hallucinogenics though. I tried shrooms once but I took only a gram and didn't get any visual effects, only mental ones. Aside from when I looked in the mirror and I could see a sort of 3x3 distorted grid on the mirror and my own face warped into all sorts of monstrous proportions lol

and a part of me wants to skip any and all preparation and trial-by-fire do DMT and hopefully reach an ego death and just be done with it all

>>1604270
I've reacted similarly, though a bit more reserved regardless. Like, I did weed and then fundamentally understood eyesight and the human perception/construction of reality via the eyes and the conic/spheric calculus of spatial volume.

LSD was the second most awful experience of my life, but totally worth it for the immense knowledge I got from it. You have to go in with an objective frame of mind, but also an appreciative one. My friend tripped for 6 hours, and I tripped for a full 28 hours straight. It literally made me think that, like the Spook Field, I was a fundamental flaw in the universe and equitable to Satan (thanks Catholic upbringing). Worst experience was being given fucking K2 without being told it was K2, and then doing 4 bowls of it in quick succession and getting sent to the hospital. Felt like living a fucking Tool video. Thinking felt like breathing Peptobismol mixed with vomit.

DMT I've always wanted to try, but it's best to do "easier" stuff first I hear.

Anyways, these things do open your mind up, and it's your textual interpretation that matters in the end. For example, I've always thought Time Cube guy was just someone who was absolute garbage at describing "all of time always exists". There's some eldritch knowledge you can reach into.

>>1602886

I came in your moms pussy last night.

>>1604314
That's something that just very recently like within the last week occurred to me
i had the EXACT same thought ((christian upbringing)) that maybe, with the way that within the past year or two I've utterly rejected god and decided that if the christian god truly exists that i would spit in his face and walk backwards into hell, that maybe I am an equitable "Satan" and damned to hell at the end of my life.

I used to smoke weed with my friends and watch nature documentaries and all I would do is imagine what it was really like to be the animal. To think without language, to feel limbs in different positions and the sensation of moving them, etc. and ever since those experiences I believe 100% that anything with a mind experiences reality and consciousness and that all of the animal kingdom is just as valid as humanity in terms of conscious existence.

And yeah, the eldritch knowledge that I felt like I tapped into in that panic attack is that there are forces that exist, and that they sort of have a consciousness but rather than a streamlined slow consciousness through the boundaries of time, it's a consciousness in which it experiences all moments simultaneously. I have utterly no idea for the words for this but that basically there are forces which are "gods" for lack of a better term but they don't really exist. It's like if a mathematical equation could perceive. That, for example, gravity is a god; time is a god; etc. but they don't experience ANYWHERE near our human ideas of perception. That it's sort of like if you accessed all the data on a hard drive at once and each individual force in the universe is an individual hard drive and then there's a grandmaster hard drive holding them all and they all know everything about all of us and they all don't care about a single bit of it, being forces and not beings. and seriously i'm so drunk at this point i apologize i keep drinking but i sincerely hope i come across well enough.

>>1604373
Ha ha, nice stuff Anon. I don't agree with everything personally, but that's what makes it cool; everyone who pushes into stuff hard enough will by necessity create a belief system that reflects their inner reality—I think that's going off of Nietzsche.

LSD will make you truly experience things that you "experience". It's quite the invigorating experience, intellectually. It's like jumping up an order of magnitude of perception.

MDMA isn't a psychadelic but it also allows for some more empathetic insights.

>>1604404
yeah i guess at the end of the day what it all revolves back to is

the only existence is our own

absolute pleasure venting to you man

>>1604404
>>1604419

that is if you're even actually there and not a projection of my subconscious according to the un-disprovable theory of solipsism
winky face

>>1603149
>We all die every night.

AND THE AWARD FOR MOST RETARDED COMMENT GOES TO...

>>1604425
To be honest, it's not the most retarded. It's a thought experiment, but pretty easily rebuffed. Since, you know, active thoughts =/= self.

>>1604419
>>1604420
Thanks, I enjoyed talking, Anon. Even if I don't exist.

>>1604434
As an aside before I go
i literally came on 4chan to go to gif and jack it
and saw this in thread in the popular threads section out of the corner of my eye

and so i just wanted to share that literally just a primal want to jack led to the first time i've really gotten to open up and vent about this in the 2 years since i first smoked weed and the avalanche started and that that want to jack is the only reason we just had this conversation

you strike me as the kinda guy that could get a laugh out of and appreciate that, haha.

>>1602599
key word here is model, you can never have 'true' consciousness

>>1604445
Ha, yeah, that's definitely pretty hilarious. Kind of funny to say that wanting to jack it is like a human imperative that's gotten humanity this far, too.

>>1604484
yeah like the idea that I kind of find hard to refute that honestly just comes from a joke from an episode of futurama that deep down on a subconscious level any and all things stem from a want to impress the opposite sex and reproduce

>>1599794
>In monkeys, motor intention in its different forms emerges from a parietal–frontal gradient of visual, eye and hand signals, containing discrete dominant domains. These are formed by areas sharing cortical connections and functional properties. Within this gradient, the combination of different inputs determines the tuning properties of neurons, while local and long cortico-cortical connections shape the structure and temporal delays of the network. The pathways linking similar functional domains in parietal and frontal cortex sculpt information processing systems related to different functions, all requiring eye-hand coordination. fMRI experiments show that similar gradients lay at the core of cognitive-motor control in humans as well. This eye-hand matrix provides a framework to address, within a unitary frame, not only basic forms of motor behavior, such as reaching and grasping, but also actions of increasing complexity, such as interception of moving targets, tool use, construction of complex objects, maze analysis and solution, among others. The organization of the cerebral cortex into functional gradients and domains, beyond frontal and parietal cortices, is common to other brain regions, such as prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, and does not support views of the parieto-frontal operations based on specific and strictly segregated eye and hand modules. These can only be found at the eye and hand motor output domains in the frontal cortex, that is in the frontal eye fields and in the primary motor cortex, respectively.

>>1599471
yeah but >ELECTROLITESSS XD LMAO

>>1603282
>Use an incredibly nebulous term that can mean absolutely fucking anything
>Someone presses you on it
>Haha, they must be an atheist! I'll throw a meme at them.

>>1605555

This is the horrible truth of it: Consciousness is staggeringly complicated and there's no simple trick to understanding it. "What is consciousness?" is like asking "what is gravity?", it seems innocuous and straightforward enough but the closer you look for an answer, the weirder and more complex it all becomes.

>>1607205
>what is consciousness
>"dude it's just toooooo complex for us lmao it's like magic or something it's just so complex it's impossible SPOOK FIELD"

can you guys leave?

>>1607216
>HURR

>>1607221
Do you have any evidence for things being "weirder and more complex" the closer you look at something? Because science doesn't work like that. I know this is the humanities board, but all this "dude like you can't even understand stuff because it's complex and even language is too complex for us to even know it's too complex" retardation is sad.

Consciousness is already understood. It's neurons firing, chemicals. It's an illusion.

>>1607242
but if consciousness is an illusion, then what ISN'T?

>>1607242
>Do you have any evidence for things being "weirder and more complex" the closer you look at something?

Have you looked at soemthing? Ever? Anything really, the back of your hand will do. Take a really close look, use a microscope. Note how it's much more complicated than it at first seems. This is true of literally everything.

>>1607242
>>1607259
like, if consciousness is really just an illusion
then what's the thing that's here being illusioned?

>>1607242
>Consciousness is already understood. It's neurons firing, chemicals. It's an illusion.

What a stupid thing to say.

>>1607263
>Some high school student who does too much weed lecturing an actual STEM student

>>1607286
>some autist thinks being a student is some kind of achievment

File: 13592773_1552039588439287_1570453267379035036_n.jpg (72KB, 640x640px) Image search: [Google]

72KB, 640x640px

>>1607286

>>1607294
Are you going to start quoting Kant at me like a fag or something?

>you can't know nuffin
>you can't even know that you can't know nuffin
>you can't know what somethin is cause it's nuffin
>you can't even know what you is cause you's nuffin
>b-but i have free will; FUCK SPOOKS

>>1607303
i don't even know that i have free will so you missed a level

>>1607303
just explain real quick how it's possible to know anything ever without the ability to step outside of only existing in one limited single human being's perspective

>>1607317
Explain how you know you can't know something if you can't know anything

Humans can corroborate. This is like arguing with Christians about fucking evolution. There's literal evidence for it. How can we operate and function without the ability to know things? How did the concept of knowing things even arise if we can't know things?

>Yeah but you can't know something A HUNDRED HUNDRED PERCENT FOR SURE

That doesn't mean it gets "more complex". Just because going from 99% to 99.9% "knownness" is hard, doesn't mean that suddenly you know nothing. That's retarded. You're the fucking Zeno's Paradox of knowledge. Learn calculus. Learn science. Do something that isn't shitpost about what a genius Max Stirner was or whatever.

>>1607347
i think for the sake of just chilling and living life that i should assume that what i understand to be reality is actual reality and that the things are know are true etc etc

but all i'm saying is at the end of the day everything can be fake and solipsism is correct or simulation theory or what the fuck ever

>>1607362
Solipsism isn't correct because I have a consciousness.

>>1607368
how do you know anyone else does?

I assume they do but how do you know

it's like religion you can't ultimately disprove it so who fuckin knows

>>1607374
The chances are miniscule that of all people who ever lived I'm the only one who's actually real. It's "what if I'm the dream of a butterfly" tier philosophy.

Other people can certainly be stupider. Perhaps so stupid they can't even be considered human. But solipsism makes no sense. The human brain could not support a universe that works off of the physics that it does. It's too complex.

Solipsism is literally as possible as Jesus being both fully divine and fully human, because that's what solipsism implies. Maybe all of us have illusionary consciousness and Jesus was born as the only human to ever live with an actual consciousness.

I'm being facetious.

>>1599433
Consciousness is just another thing in a laundry list of things that "science" has no answer for.

>>1607291

Excuse the USA plebz.....

>>1607389
>The chances are miniscule that of all people who ever lived I'm the only one who's actually real. It's "what if I'm the dream of a butterfly" tier philosophy.

If you're the only one who's actually real then you're the only thing you could be. There's no such thing as chance when it comes to the idea of solipsism. The chance is 100% because you are the universe and the universe is everything. Everyone else is fake and you're the sole medium of the universe experiencing itself. Chance doesn't enter the equation.

>>1607389
i am finding it hard to put my reasoning into words, but think of your being the only person existing as you would through the anthropic principle

i'm not sure that makes sense, i apologise