Jacob Falkovich talks about how people have different minds, and how different minds can have differing experiences of what qualia involves to them, and thus we need to be careful in generalizing from our own mind:
For one, the decoupling of conscious experience from deterministic external causes implies that there’s truly no such thing as a “universal experience”. Our experiences are shared by virtue of being born with similar brains wired to similar senses and observing a similar world of things and people, but each of us infers a generative model all of our own. For every single perception mentioned in Being You it also notes the condition of having a different one, from color blindness to somatoparaphrenia — the experience that one of your limbs belongs to someone else. The typical mind fallacy goes much deeper than mere differences in politics or abstract beliefs.
My own take on what consciousness is in the general case is basically answered by me in the review below, and short form, I think Anil Seth got it close to right, with the mistakes being broadly patchable rather than fatal flaws to a theory:
For as long as there have been philosophers, they loved philosophizing about what life really is. Plato focused on nutrition and reproduction as the core features of living organisms. Aristotle claimed that it was ultimately about resisting perturbations. In the East the focus was less on function and more on essence: the Chinese posited ethereal fractions of qi as the animating force, similar to the Sanskrit prana or the Hebrew neshama. This lively debate kept rolling for 2,500 years — élan vital is a 20th century coinage — accompanied by the sense of an enduring mystery, a fundamental inscrutability about life that will not yield.
And then, suddenly, this debate dissipated. This wasn’t caused by a philosophical breakthrough, by some clever argument or incisive definition that satisfied all sides and deflected all counters. It was the slow accumulation of biological science that broke “Life” down into digestible components, from the biochemistry of living bodies to the thermodynamics of metabolism to genetics. People may still quibble about how to classify a virus that possesses some but not all of life’s properties, but these semantic arguments aren’t the main concern of biologists. Even among the general public who can’t tell a phospholipid from a possum there’s no longer a sense that there’s some impenetrable mystery regarding how life can arise from mere matter.
Or this comment, which comes from a similar place:
I’m sympathetic to Global Workspace theory as an explanation of some of the weird properties of human consciousness, like the approximate unitarity of it, though this is also explainable by latencies being acceptably low for a human body.
Jacob Falkovich talks about how people have different minds, and how different minds can have differing experiences of what qualia involves to them, and thus we need to be careful in generalizing from our own mind:
My own take on what consciousness is in the general case is basically answered by me in the review below, and short form, I think Anil Seth got it close to right, with the mistakes being broadly patchable rather than fatal flaws to a theory:
More here:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FQhtpHFiPacG3KrvD/seth-explains-consciousness#7ncCBPLcCwpRYdXuG
Or in quote form:
Or this comment, which comes from a similar place:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FQhtpHFiPacG3KrvD/seth-explains-consciousness#oghhLpFNsvvN8FHpk
I’m sympathetic to Global Workspace theory as an explanation of some of the weird properties of human consciousness, like the approximate unitarity of it, though this is also explainable by latencies being acceptably low for a human body.
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/ZbmRyDN8TCpBTZSip/p/x4n4jcoDP7xh5LWLq
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FEDNY4DLMpRSE3Jsr/neural-basis-for-global-workspace-theory
But that’s my take on the debate on consciousness.