Folks who try salvia divinorum seem to encounter that “effect” quite abit. They get stuck in carpets or furniture etc.:eek: One trip report the guy ended up in a the fender of an old truck somewhere in Mexico, on a farm. He describes the people going by etc.
Funny stuff!
Is consciousness actually measurable? Or is it only something we can infer but not measure directly in another being?
For example, is it possible to study consciousness without being conscious yourself? One of the things that science demands is objectivity. I don’t think it’s possible to actually be objective about this one. Even brain scans have to be interpreted…by someone who is conscious.
If the last person on earth is struck by an original idea, but has no one to share that newfound awareness with, is he or she still conscious?
What if life is but a dream?
What if the hokey pokey really is what’s all about?
What if no one ever responds to any of these questions?
Okay, I know this one is fiction, but what about zombies? Are they conscious? If they move like humans but have no awareness of what they’re doing (or do they…?), would we call them unconscious? Semi-conscious? Which I suppose also brings us back to animals…would we consider animals to be conscious at some level or is that a trait reserved for humans?
Well, some zombies seem to have enough consciousness to play computer games, which probably doesn’t settle the matter one way or another;
http://onealternateending.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/nick-frost-zombie.png
I hear you about the video games. Just enough brain power required to get to the next level, but not enough brain power to actually quit the game.
Are we really conscious? An article from the New York Times. Opinion | Are We Really Conscious? - The New York Times
Interesting article. If I read it correctly, it suggests that consciousness is an illusion…and that there is no answer to the question, “Who is fooled by the illusion?” No one is: that’s the point. The illusion is that there is anyone who is fooled by the illusion.
The “self” we experience is as illusory as an amputee’s phantom limb. It feels real…to itself. The universe, meanwhile, sits back and moves atoms around.
I (who?) don’t know if I agree with this idea. I think the concept of the individual mind and its conscious experiences is still of useful and valid overall descriptive value. Certainly, it is still an indispensable model in sociology, economy, political science, and so on.
At very worst, it’s akin to the scientific reductionism of our existence as composites of cells and atoms. We can never feel ourselves as made up of cells and atoms, and so the idea – even though true – can never be accepted as a conviction from experience. It’s like Relativity or Uncertainty: even if it is true, we will never, ever, “sense” it to be true.
Exactly. I had a revelationary experience at the dentist once when I had me wisdom tooth removed. It occurred to me: there is a part of me now on the other side of the room that has been with me for the past forty odd years, and now it is over there and I am still here. “I.” “Me.” And it occurred to me that I say “my tooth” just as I say “my arm” or “my hand” or even “my brain” or “my mind,” as though it were another entity entirely (the real me) that owns these things. I did not see the extracted tooth as “me” any more than my hand is “me,” or even that my brain or my mind is “me.” Which begs the question, who is “me” exactly then? Who am I?
Our cells completely replace themselves in a matter of months or years, and yet we carry on with the same consciousness all our lives. In fact, it is the one thing I can be certain of while everything else in my life may change. As Joe Walsh once said, everybody’s so different; I haven’t changed. This leads me to believe that consciousness is definitely real, even if it can’t be proven (anymore than “God” or even “life” can be proven), and that my simple awareness of myself and the world in which I live is a pretty amazing thing.
Or maybe it was just the anaesthetic talking.
Grin! The total contribution of wine to philosophy has never fully been assessed!
And, of course, the questions are of great ancientry. Plato asked the same question: if you chop off my arm…I’m still a man. Both arms and legs… Rip out my guts… At what point do I stop being a person?
(Watching my father fade from existence due to advanced Parkinson’s led me to the same question. At what point, exactly, did he die? He ceased being the man he was long before he stopped breathing.)
Well, to everybody who claims that consciousness is an illusion, I can only say, fine, explain then how we can have that illusion—how we can have any illusion at all, since having an illusion is there being something it is like to have that illusion; but how that ‘what it’s like-ness’ comes about is exactly the problem. It might be the case that calling consciousness an illusion is a useful metaphor for some approaches, but ultimately, the problem of explaining it doesn’t seem to get any easier.
And of course, what we call an illusion is itself a very vaguely defined notion. One might call my right arm an illusion, since ultimately, there are only bones, nerves, blood vessels, and other tissue, but nothing that could be called an ‘arm’, or, at a deeper level, there are cells of varying description, or molecules and atoms, etc.—but that would just be missing the point. Explaining what constitutes the arm is not to explain away the arm.
The point remains, there’s unquestionably something it is like to be me; illusion or not, that’s the basic explanandum.
Yep. This is perhaps the critical thing about subjective experience; that the illusion of a subjective experience would itself be an experience, so it’s pointless to say it’s only an illusion.
Frankly, it’s pretty clear to me that such labelling is a handwave. It’s not as though proponents of the idea of it being an illusion then follow up with some concrete claim that follows from that view. It’s meant to be: consciousness is an illusion; stop talking about it.
Well I think the misconception many have is that illusion is some attribute that we can apply to phenomena. Like we can see a thing, and stick a flag in it, saying “Illusion”.
But really that’s not the way we use the term. If I see a ufo then it’s “real” on one level or another, even if it was just a hallucination. I saw “something”.
The concept of illusion only comes in when we have multiple interpretations of an event. At any time the interpretation that best makes sense of the totality of our experiences is “real”. The rejected interpretations are illusions.
I’m not married to the idea, but I have a lot of respect for Dennett, and, frankly, if he says it’s an illusion, I’d start to take the notion very seriously.
I can’t work out your sentence: “…since having an illusion is there being something it is like to have that illusion.” Could you try that one again?
I definitely agree that there is a wonderful circularity to, “The illusion creates the illusion of self that, itself, is deceived by the illusion.”
But, then, the origin of the cosmos in the Big Bang is perceived by many to be a “circular” explanation.
It isn’t necessarily fallacious to say that a large and complex enough accumulation of neurons will organize itself in such a way as to perceive itself as perceiving itself.
If you have an illusion, there’s something it is like to have that illusion. But the question is exactly how it’s possible for there to be something it is like to have experiences. So, as Mijin points out, while we may be deceived about the content of our experience, we can’t be deceived about the fact that we have subjective experiences, because being so deceived is the same thing as having the experience. It’s like arguing that we’re deceived into having a headache: there’s nothing beyond feeling like we have a headache to having a headache, thus, if we feel like we have a headache, then we do; this is simply what it means to have a headache, or what it means to have any experience in general.
Then I’d say that those people misunderstand the Big Bang.
Well, possibly not, but those claiming this to be the case need to provide a plausible story as to how.
Possibly, but it’s also fair to say that these neurons will never understand their ultimate purpose and just do what they were meant to do. Kind of like us. The individual atoms, molecules, bones and muscles if my arm may not know whether I am gearing up to replace a head gasket, strum a guitar, or stab an enemy in the eye; they are just along for the ride, even though I could not fulfill my intent without their participation. In fact, if any part of the system makes an error, I experience that error as a moment of hesitation that could be life-threatening under the right circumstances.
Perhaps we humans with what we perceive as a consciousness and free will are simply automatons, parts of a much larger machine or consciousness that we do not understand nor need to understand most of the time. Occasionally we may get a glimpse of that higher purpose, but that’s about as much info as we’ll get in this lifetime.
For example, it baffles me how many planets and stars there must be in the known universe that we will never know about in this lifetime, perhaps even during the entire existence of this species on the planet. Seems like such a wasted effort. Unless…our existence is just a part of a much bigger plan to know the cosmos in a way that we can’t comprehend yet. Kind of puts consciousness in a different framework if you think of it as something outside of yourself but that includes yourself.
I wonder… I’ve had hallucinatory experiences that aren’t “like” anything else in my life. I once had a “new emotion” that was unlike any of the standard emotions.
That’s kinda the point, read backward. The illusion of the experience is the same thing as having the experience.
In practice, not actually. Read the word “headache” 100 times, and your mind will start experiencing something akin to one, but without actually being one. It’s weird, but true: we are excellent at deceiving ourselves in all sorts of ways.
You can eat a huge meal, and still be enticed by an advertisement for something yummy. You aren’t hungry…but the part of your brain that governs hunger can still be activated.
Recent work in perception has shown that we live our lives about 1/10 of a second in the past. The conscious state takes the brain about 1/10 second to generate.
But we cover this up with the illusion of living in the present. Our brains gloss over the delay, and essentially censor it.
The best way I can recommend to become conscious of this delay is to be startled. Say you’re lying in bed, quietly reading, and a truck on the street outside backfires. BANG! If you’re very good at self-perception, you can realize that your body heard the noise before your “self” did. You can replay the experience, and realize how your muscles stiffened and your shoulders jerked – and that only then, just a tiny bit of time later, you were consciously aware of the noise.
There are also the brain-scan studies that show that the motor-control parts of the brain activate slightly in advance of our conscious and self-aware intentions to move our bodies. My brain is already working to send nerve-impulses to my hand, before I am conscious of my intent to make a fist.
It seems likely. We’re just individual muscle cells in a vastly larger organism. Then again, we’re pretty enlightened muscle cells, and we have at least a dim, remote voice in what the organism is going to do.
Alas, I think all we are is an emergent effect arising out of the flow of energy through the biosphere. We feel as if we have a purpose, but all we’re really doing is increasing cosmic entropy.
Still…we have some degree of self-expression, and we are lucky enough to exist in an overall environment that includes internet philosophy debates and chocolate!
Oops! Wrong! A lovely little warning against hubris, but it said that “none of the atoms in our bodies are the ones we were born with.”
Way wrong. Trillions of the atoms in our bodies are the atoms we were born with. The number of atoms in the human body is simply that vast, immensely larger than the number of human-body sized domains in the earth’s biosphere.
Your body also contains trillions of atoms that were once part of the bodies of Julius Caesar, Jesus Christ, Moses, Saint Mark, and Raoul Mitgong. (“But he didn’t help much.”)
Otherwise, a well-taken point.
No, the point is that an illusion of an experience would itself be an experience. Therefore it doesn’t matter whether you read forwards or backwards; the explanatory gap is the same.
Or, put it like this: let’s say I don’t really see red, I only have an illusion of the colour red. How is an illusion of seeing red inferior or different to a real experience of seeing red?