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Consciousness is the only thing in the universe that cannot be an illusion (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

31 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'll start by acknowledging that this isn’t my idea, credit to Sam Harris. I also don’t know if this is even controversial, but I figured this would be a better place to post than in Showerthoughts.

By consciousness, I mean the subjective experience of what it feels like to be. As philosopher Thomas Nagel put it:

'An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.'

It’s at least conceivable that things like free will, the self, or even the entire universe could be an illusion. For all we know, we could be living in a simulation and nothing might be real. Even if you don’t believe that, there’s still a greater-than-zero chance you could be wrong. However, this doesn't apply to consciousness itself. Even if everything is just a hallucination, it remains an undeniable fact that it feels like something to hallucinate. To claim that consciousness could be an illusion is a self-contradictory statement as consciousness is where illusions appear.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I couldn't claim to have a definition as the origins of consciousness are still unknown to science and not formally defined.

However your definition is definitely not the widely accepted one. It doesn't even offer a proper definition, all it does is push the unknowns to "what it is like to be that organism".

Who defines what it is to "be" something? What is the smallest unit of "being"? Are we saying that consciousness is an inherent property of organisms or could it be recreated on a computer?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Consciousness is the fact that it feels like something to be. It's the feels like part that's relevant here. Not the to be part. It's the subjective quality of experience. It describes a phenomenom in the real world, doesn't explain it. There is no evidence of consciousness in the world except for the fact that you can experience it yourself. It's entirely subjective.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

But then you're just pushing the unknown/undefined part to "feels like".

We cannot define it properly so we can't discuss it formally or make assertions like it's the only thing in the universe that is not an illusion.

You could assert "Cogito, ergo sum." but that's kind of been done before.