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Yes consciousness is an illusion but the illusion is real.
We are pattern recognizing feedback loops (with memory) who simulate a reality not the reality.
This simulation happen to be calibrated in such a way that it allow us to navigate the reality with some success by proxy of our simulation of it.
Isn't that past the point where something stops being an illusion and starts being real?
I find this question, like whether we have 'free will' in a deterministic universe, to be meaningless. You are simply stretching a naive interpretation of the concept until it's breaking point, and then claiming reality doesn't fit with that concept. One should at the very least consider if the original definition used was perhaps too naive.
Real for who?
Free will is obviously an extremely important subject since its the assumption behind most of our moral and legal system. You can of course ignore it and just assume, however I am unconvinced that does anything good to our understanding of other people.
I agree that our subjective experience is an "illusion" (or more accurately, a construct) rather than an accurate representation of our environment. Furthermore, this is fairly easy to prove.
On the other hand, if consciousness is the property of having a subjective experience of existence, it is silly to call consciousness an illusion. An illusion is something that appears to exist, but actually does not. The very fact that we are able to perceive the "illusion" contradicts the implication of the statement.
The illusory aspects are ideas that consciousness is "atomic", constantly present, persistent, flows continuously and we are fully in control of it.
Modern neurology proves otherwise.
No because the point of calling it an illusion is to say that we are more in the passenger seat looking at our lifes as if we were the one driving the car.
> We are pattern recognizing feedback loops (with memory) who simulate a reality not the reality.
This could also hold for a philosophical zombie, so this doesn't say anything about consciousness. Or perhaps we're talking about different kinds of consciousness here (unfortunately, good standard terminology seems missing).
If I have understood the article correctly, the main idea is that philosophical zombies don't exist. Or rather, that we all are. The "thing" that would separate us from them, subjective consciousness, would be just an illusion - another feature in the zombie/human brain, like memory or perception.
What is the reality?
World Science Festival has a slew of really awesome talks etc on this subject posted to youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H9ul7pqezs&list=PLKy-B3Qf_R...
And The Neuroscience of Consciousness – with Anil Seth is really great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRel1JKOEbI
Information, Evolution, and intelligent Design - With Daniel Dennett: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZX6awZq5Z0
That second talk is fantastic. Thanks for sharing.
One interesting note he makes is that (according to metrics they developed) the hallucinogens really do help you achieve higher level of consciousness. All those self-reports of reaching "awakening" and "enlightenment" could actually be supported by neuroscience. Unfortunately it's too hard to get proper funding for any research on subject.
It doesn't really matter what is running the physics, whether it's a "real" world doing that, or some other process that some then call "illusion" which imho the same anyway after all it's real enough that we're able to think inside of it. Whether it's an illusion or not, the fact is that the consciousness is still there. The process that makes us aware (not just the sensing, the ability to know you think about it etc...) of the information (the world, no matter how it works) needs to be explained.
Imho Douglas Hofstadter comes closest to trying to explain it without all that kind of pitfalls in "I Am a Strange Loop". Not that it actually truly explains it, but at least it acknowledges those things that make me normally dismiss theories that could explain consciousness.
>fact is that the consciousness is still there.
There is a small problem with this claim. Or, at least there is a problem if you happen to believe in popperian philosophy of science that says that claims that are not falsifiable are non-scientific.
Obviously, from popperian point of view that claim is about as unfalsifiable as is the claim that God created earth and everything on it. Which may be true or may be not, but the claim is not a claim in the scientific realm but in religious realm, and I would be a bit vary to consider claims in religious (or non-scientific if that is a bit less sensitive word) realm "facts".
I mean, it feels obvious that I have conscience, but how do you prove or disprove that claim? I have no idea. It feels obvious that earth is flat, but there are ways to prove that wrong.
I think you might be dismissing the article while actually agreeing with its core argument. It's not about a substrate on which reality is running - it's about access to the mechanisms of consciousness and how our view of consciousness doesn't reflect those mechanisms fully.
Dennett's explanation basically uses Hofstadter's conception.
It doesn't matter for now. AI is coming. We better have it figured out by then.
The very notion doesn't even make sense.
Illusion presupposes consciousness.
It sounds like you might have skipped over the part of the article that clarifies how Dennett is using that word. I excerpted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13791547
s/consciousness/self for a more sensible sound bite.
Ha-ha-ha. Exactly.
Illusion of WHO?
Anything that can have illusions is a consciousness.
I came up with this analogy to think about prior and new knowledge: Aliens.
If aliens exist, they will have existed a priori, or before thought or knowledge. Granted, they wouldn't have existed a priori from their standpoint, but the logical conclusion, once you've found some aliens, is that there are always more aliens.
i.e. If life is a "thing" in the universe, it is a "thing" because of a priori knowledge.
If aliens don't exist, then that fact would also be a priori, given you could do an exhaustive search for aliens in the universe. As you probably can't do an exhaustive search because of size/energy constraints, you can look at the claim "there are no aliens" as one which is unprovable, and thus irrational.
i.e. If we never find aliens in the universe, it is a "thing" that can not be a priori (or a posteriori for that matter).
This "alternate fact" itself may be a priori, inasmuch as the state of being of some things may not be proved while being limited to observations (and perhaps perception) within the search scope.
Edited for logic errors. Also, the last statement here takes a stab at why the current administration's use of alternate facts can be considered a "tactic" in which the scope of observation and perception of others is greatly limited.
One thing that always strikes me about this kind of analysis or discussion is that it presupposes we have reached some kind of evolutionary final state -- that humans now possess all of the "competence" and "affordances" that will be necessary to comprehend the true nature of our existence and experience. Personally, I think that's naive, and that we are still very far from true understanding. In the same way that a cat is very far from comprehending geopolitics or calculus.
Related to "final state" is the assumption that there will be no successor beings. Surely evolution will continue to create beings (bio or silicon) that are more competent than humans -- perhaps it already has. Cattle can observe humans and their actions, but the cattle do not comprehend that they are captive and food. I'm not sure why it would be any different between humans and successors.
Dennett denies his own first person evidence of his own consciousness so that he can sustain his belief that all that exists is the materialistic world view. Motivated reasoning in the extreme and completely violating Occam's Razor which is quite ironic.
I believe the counterargument is that subjective personal experience, even when shared by lots of people, doesn't count as evidence. Subjective experience has been proven unreliable well enough through history, even for massively shared cases.
first person evidence doesen't lead you anywhere. Its a = a, true but quite trivial.
The user-illusion metaphor is a central idea in Donald Hoffman's work. I'm not sure who borrowed it from whom.
This still seems not to [try to] answer the really hard question - how does a bunch of quarks and electrons go from mindlessly following the laws of physics to saying »Look, we are a bunch of quarks and electrons!«? I admittedly found it somewhat hard at times to follow the argument of the article, but in the end it seems to argue that consciousness is just one of many models embedded in our brain, more specifically a metamodel of the other models. But, assuming that I did not misunderstand the argument, that seems not to help much to explain how the laws of physics manage to reflect on themselves and bring the the awareness of existence into existence.
The reason for this is solidly rooted in evolution. Having an internal model of your surroundings allows you to better interact with your surroundings. This is an evolutionary advantage. At some point, this expands to a model of yourself.
I can see 2 ways for this model to come about. The first is directly, where being able to anticipate your own reactions is advantageous. The second is socially. That is, you need to model others to better anticipate their reactions. When those others are similar enough to yourself, those same modeling procedures also start working on yourself.
This kind of modeling can get started by very simple correlations. Say you accidentally get some photo-sensitive cells. Over time, if their output starts affecting what direction you move (say away from the cells when less light falls on them) and all of a sudden you are capable of fleeing from predators.
The idea of the illusion is not really a new one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_(illusion) .
That is completely different though. Hinduism states that other than consciousness everything else is an illusion.
As I read it, this is an argument about what it means to be 'real'. The argument goes along the lines of consciousness can only be described behaviouristically. Therefore it is a behaviour. Moreover, consciousness only is a 'metaphor' for the material world, rather than a description of the material world.
This is then taken to mean that it is so far divorced from the material world so as to merely be an illusion.
No. It's not an illusion. It's an ability to perceive abstract meaning from raw data, evaluate and act in order to maximize future rewards and the ability to learn in order to improve perception and acting.
The article says that abstract concepts representing whole classes of perceptions are user-illusions. They are just patterns, and the concepts they represent are the best explainers of the data. The patterns exist in the data, they are not made-up as the article might imply. They are patterns discovered by experience, and learned.
Even if consciousness and abstract concepts were all "illusions", that would expand the meaning of illusion, they would become equal to the concepts of mind and soul of the past.
My position on consciousness is that we don't need the concept of consciousness. We should use the concepts of Reinforcement Learning instead. Instead of consciousness, we're concerned with an agent. The agent is just an entity embedded in a world, an external environment. It can sense the environment and act, trying to maximize its rewards. For humans, the ultimate reward is survival and reproduction (which is another kind of survival). So it's a loop of perception-judgement-action-reward.
We don't need the often mystical and imprecise concept of consciousness because it generates useless debates. It's too loaded, everyone means something else by it, the experts can't even define it in a way they can all agree upon. It's a legacy from the past, one step above the concept of soul, but one step behind that of autonomous agent optimizing actions and learning from rewards. The concept of agent is much more parsimonious, it can be easily defined, measured, simulated and studied from the 3rd person perspective, unlike consciousness.
The question is incredibly ridiculous. Consciousness is the most first-hand evidence we have. Everything is experienced via consciousness. You could ask if neurons are illusions, or if matter and energy are illusions, but it's ridiculous to ask if consciousness is an illusion.
If rats could talk they would say they have consciousness. This is not a human trait as even some philosophers seem to believe.
If you ask me, the idea that consciousness is an illusion is an illusion...huh
Doesn't an illusion imply a consciousness to experience the illusion?
Betteridge's Law holds, and the author misrepresents Dennett's thesis. Dennett doesn't deny the existence of consciousness, animals, etc. as claimed, but rather says that our conceptions of consciousness, animals, etc. represent only the subset of existent phenomena that can be conceptualized with hardware that evolved via natural selection. Dennett posits that this effect favors conceptions that benefit the conceiver's chances of reproduction (either in a genetic or memetic sense) rather than conceptions that accurately represent the phenomena.
Dennett's work is much better than this review, and I recommend reading the book rather than the review.
That's just a wordy way of saying that we evolved according to Darwin and our consciousness was selected. Not terribly original or deep. Yawn.
If it is, is this an indictment of consciousness? Or of illusion?
If consciousness is an illusion, who is it falling for it?
We are, obviously. From the article:
"Nor do we have to understand the mechanisms that underlie those competencies. In an illuminating metaphor, Dennett asserts that the manifest image that depicts the world in which we live our everyday lives is composed of a set of user-illusions,
'like the ingenious user-illusion of click-and-drag icons, little tan folders into which files may be dropped, and the rest of the ever more familiar items on your computer’s desktop. What is actually going on behind the desktop is mind-numbingly complicated, but users don’t need to know about it, so intelligent interface designers have simplified the affordances, making them particularly salient for human eyes, and adding sound effects to help direct attention. Nothing compact and salient inside the computer corresponds to that little tan file-folder on the desktop screen.'
He says that the manifest image of each species is 'a user-illusion brilliantly designed by evolution to fit the needs of its users.' In spite of the word 'illusion' he doesn’t wish simply to deny the reality of the things that compose the manifest image; the things we see and hear and interact with are 'not mere fictions but different versions of what actually exists: real patterns.' The underlying reality, however, what exists in itself and not just for us or for other creatures, is accurately represented only by the scientific image—ultimately in the language of physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and neurophysiology."
I think consciousness is a concept created by our brain. It likes the concept of 'angry'. We all know what it feels like. But there is no 'angry'thing, our brain created it too.
Sam Harris disagrees, arguing "Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion"
https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-mystery-of-conscious...
>MARCH 9, 2017 ISSUE
That's from the future!
No.
No.
No, you're an illusion!