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this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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Asklemmy
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We have scientifically measured data that indicates our “consciousness” is emergent in the first place, and our actual senses and reasoning faculties feed data to the part of the brain that assimilates it all and creates a story post-facto.
In other words, the consciousness you think you have is really a hallucination that tries to make sense of the world after the fact. It’s a process that has worked well enough to see humanity flourish.
But some of the underlying drivers include feedback from things like gut bacteria that we don’t consciously monitor; the brain assimilates all sorts of inputs that we never really take into consideration.
So of THESE inputs, there could be all sorts that control our body that our mind then creates parallel construction to explain… and we’d almost never know.
I learned a lot just by reading your response. If I might steal a moment of your time, I'd like to ask a follow-on question.
If consciousness is completely an emergent behavior, why does it exist at all? Can't we simply be robots that execute this programming? Why create the story after the fact? Why should there be a watcher?
Of course, these are difficult questions and I don't expect you to be able to address them completely, but I wonder if there is a reasonable answer.
This is the hottest question in theory of mind right now thanks to David Chalmers. It's called the Hard Problem of Consciousness and it's about connecting the reductionist view of the brain's function with the first-person experience of consciousness.
I think that any explanation of consciousness completely from "the outside" will result in not being able to quantify the experience part of it. Any explanation completely from "the inside" will eventually run into the same issues as empiricism where it will be limited by subjectivity. I think that fundamentally we can't rigorously combine these two views because they aren't compatible. The starting points for each view carry different base assumptions.
Both may be true from within their perspectives but combining them is basically just stating that a subjective experience "maps" to a physical function. There isn't any explanatory usefulness of mapping. It doesn't explain why the subjective experience is there just that it happens when these other physical things happen. I'm not sure we'll find an answer that truly resolves the hard problem, but we're still trying.
That's fascinating and I'd love to learn more, do you happen to have some good sources on the emerging consciousness portion at hand?
I'm a personal fan of Daniel Dennett's multiple drafts theory of consciousness. The biggest problem of defining consciousness is that the deeper you look into where it comes from the definitions we commonly use to describe consciousness fall apart.
It's a collaborative effort between different parts of your brain and the environment. A lot of it we aren't even aware of. At the same time we often generate explanations for our behavior after the fact so our experience of consciousness tends to be mostly a justification mechanism, not necessarily primarily a control mechanism.