Like I say over there, I say the disc is a real thing, and the photograph of the disc is real thing: they’re just different real things. Call photographs “illusions” if you wish - anything is arguably an illusion in that case (as indeed you are arguing).
Lib, maybe it’s just me, but there’s always been something disturbingly similar in the way the mental “supervenes” on the physical and the way information is “carried” by a physical medium.
Information exhibits some of the same slippery, pinning-down-a-ghost qualities that mind does. Even Dennett, who has (cough, cough) “explained” consciousness, finds information rather perplexing:
“The idea of abstraction has been around for a long time, and 200 years ago you could enliven a philosophical imagination by asking what Mozart’s Haffner Symphony is made of. It’s ink on pieces of paper, it’s a sequence of sounds as played by people with various stringed instruments and other instruments. It’s an abstract thing. It’s a symphony. Stradivarius made violins; Mozart made symphonies, which depend on a physical realization, but don’t depend on any particular one. They have an independent existence, which can shift from one medium to another and back.”
Sentient, I almost, but not quite get what you’re saying here. You’re telling me that you are your memories and other stuff (like your right arm); but what I’m hearing is “Software is hardware”, and it’s got me confused.
It’s like this: If someone asked me “Which would you prefer to lose permanently, your arm or your consciousness?”, I’d have no hesitation in answering “Take the arm”. That’s because I have and arm, but I am my consciousness.
I’m not trying to introduce an ethereal soul here; for the purposes of your argument I’ll gladly grant that No Body=No Mind, that the “other stuff” is necessary for the memories, the same way that hardware is necessary for software to run. But the way you were describing this before, I thought you considered them to be different.
I’m still gapping on this one… it seems backwards to me. Don’t you need to have an experience before you can form a memory of it?
For the sake of thoroughness, I have to ask a question that I know you don’t have an answer for (nobody does):
If everything is just patterns of wildly-careening atoms, why are some atoms conscious and others are not?
Again, not expecting an answer, just acknowledging the question’s presence.
You know, other people are outside playing.
Do I remember rapping my knuckles on the desk way back in this thread? When I try to do so, the areas of my brain which were activated by the knuckle rapping reactivate (this is the origin of ghost limb syndrome). Given this, it’s tricky to distinguish between “me” and “my arm” even at a neuropsychological level.
What if short-term memory was a necessary element of ‘experience’?
Why are some configurations of atoms hurricanes, or magnetic north, or supernovae, and others not? If an entity can be explained in terms of atoms, does that not answer your question?
Wellll… I gotta call this one as an overstatement of fact. Some of those brain areas may be reactivated, but obviously not all, otherwise I couldn’t tell a recalled memory from a current event.
I still can’t tell whether you believe that “you” are software or hardware, or both. If it’s both, I can’t tell how you’re distinguishing between the two.
How so? (I mean, I know Baars model, but I’d like to hear yours so I’m not jumping to conclusions).
Well, if I’ve read you correctly, consciousness supervenes on arrangements of physical atoms, so my question could just as easily be: “Why aren’t some configurations of atoms conscious hurricanes, or conscious supernovae?
Yeah, but if you want to come inside long enough to make an exhaustive list of the matters under discussion, feel free. 
If it’s alright, would like to try this:
We are conditioned to recognize the arrangement of atoms in sufficiently complex patterns as consciousness. I can recognize this in myself and in fellow animals as my senses receive inputs from others that are consistent with what I expect from a conscious entity. I consider my dog as being conscious because I have conditioned her to come to me when I issue the command “come”. We share a method of communication and therefore can interact. There is no such way to do so with a hurricane. The hurricane may well be conscious and telling everyone in the Keys to move to Boston but how would our senses ever receive that information? All we are doing is recognizing similar patterns of atoms.
Is this even remotely close?
I will read this thread again in an effort not to ask questions that have already been addressed (thanks other-wise for all the questions) but I think I have one that has not been asked. If the universe is not real, then what is it that we experience? If the question has been asked an I missed it, I apologize.
otherwise, it’s starting to look like the other thread might be the more appropriate place for all of this, but to address (or not, perhaps, in your opinion) your specific points:
Well, according to Turing, software can be the equivalent of hardware, and vice versa, and so I don’t think the distinction is fundamental (although it’s certainly interesting). I keep referencing that simulation argument because I recognise that whatever seems like “hardware” may not be.
As I ask in the other thread, could it be that short-term memory activity with the accompanied cross-referencing and filtering, as moderated by chemical emotion and encoded via language is what ‘experience’ is? It sometimes seems like we could explain the weather in terms of component elements to a level comparable to anything that has ever been explained, and yet someone can still say “Yeah yeah yeah, but why does weather emerge from water and energy?”.
Because there is no memory access mechanism therein, I’d say - those question skirt very close to what I’d call category errors. “Why aren’t some configurations of atoms loud triangles or green thunderclaps?”
The corporeal we are experiencing fluctuations of the values of variables in a probability distribution.
Would it be fair to say that we are real and we yet exist in, pass through, or are immersed in this probability distribution? It seems that in order to experience the distribution, we must be apart from it. A variable within the distribution would not experience anything as it would just follow its function until it resolved.
I know I said I would read the thread again first bit I figured I would ask a follow up.
In essence, yes.
Sentient, consider a person who has suffered a neurological injury such that his short-term memory is flat gone. If you stick him with a pin, he cries out in pain, if you put something in his mouth, he swallows it if it tastes good, and spits it out otherwise. Is he conscious?
I brought up the former indirectly. What has it to do with the latter, or the question about what is real?
Because I think it plays a critical role in evolving systems like knowledge, which I would suggest is a huge inter-subjective phenomena. I see know way to grasp intersubjectivity without subjectivity, but I see no way to make sense of what intersubjectivity I see without influence of the objective.
Eh. Don’t go crazy with that. The subject ‘I’ has never told anyone where to look, and as ever the grammar of the first person perspective shouldn’t imply any ontology. But anyone who says the self is an illusion needs to pick a better phrase (as I always ask: who is the illusion fooling?).
Hmm, that’s quite a tough ask: He has absolutely zero sensory memory at all, you say, right down to the very vibrations caused by the beating of his heart? It sounds like this fellow doesn’t even have any nerves - how is he to register pain or manipulate his tongue at all if he gets no feedback therefrom?
IANA neuroscientist, as you’ve surely guessed. Anyhow, the sensory input makes it to his brain, evokes a reflex response. As you no doubt realize, I’m responding to your remark that there are no conscious hurricanes or supernovae because “there is no memory access mechanism therein, I’d say”. Is memory really the crucial issue?
Alas… I did not say I was one of the ones outside playing. I was just recalling that Huxley quote:
“While I have been fumbling over books and thinking about God and the Devil and all, other young men have been battling with the days and others have been kissing the beautiful women”.
Just because the behavior of an entity is not consistent with what we expect in the behavior of a conscious entity, or we do not share a method of communication, I don’t think we can make the leap to: this entity is not conscious (for instance, by this litmus I would be forced to conclude that a person I see lying quietly in a locked, soundproof room is not conscious).
Remember, according to Sentient, we are just patterns of atoms. In lieu of an explanation as to why our pattern of atoms is “special”, I can’t see why the pattern of atoms in a hurricane shouldn’t be conscious too.