The more I think about consciousness, the more I think it’s ridiculous to have anything but the sparsest take on how to consider it. We should eschew anthropocentrism (mind-centrism? mind projection?) at every step. While it may have some nasty-sounding consequences in areas like ethics, I can’t convince myself that conscious minds have any special place in the universe, for any reason. It’s this century’s answer to having the Earth at the centre of the universe.
To relate my point to the parable: I would say that if you have all the information about a brain-split—if you know the exact position and momentum of every particle at every point—but you’re still asking ‘yes, but when does one consciousness become two?’ then you’re asking a wrong question. The consequence of this is removing that central name tag called ‘+/-consciousness’ in your neural ‘attributes of consciousness’ network.
When you think about it, drawing a line around all your neurons etc and saying ‘this is me’ is ridiculous. What about the dead cells? or the cells that have no observable effect? how many neurons can I remove before you stop being ‘you’? If you claim there’s a ‘self’ inside your head that emerges, from all the wetware, unified and irreducible, you’re setting yourself up for impossible questions just like the poor Ebboreans. Difficult though it is, you have to drop the mind-centrism. Am I saying that consciousness is an illusion? That’s not how I’d put it – after all, illusions are things that minds perceive. But what is, is real. Consciousness is. It’s just not ‘special’. You have no more ‘weight’ than a copy of yourself that assembles itself at random for a fraction of a second in a distant galaxy. Sorry. (By this rationale, ‘zombies’ are a nonsense too. )
When you ask ‘Why is red red?’, for me you’ve already projected your mind onto the territory. Red isn’t red in the world. It’s red in your map as a result of how your brain entangles itself with photons at a certain wavelength—an artefact of evolution—and I don’t need to explain that any more than I need to explain why you want your eggs sunny side up. Don’t mistake confusion and gaps in our knowledge for mysticism.
Really good stuff, Eliezer. Why do I get the feeling that we won’t ever get to hear what the big wonderful theory was? I’m just on the last chapter of GEB, and I’ve really enjoyed it, but I’ve no doubt your final piece will be entirely your own—it certainly deserves to be. That said, I like the sound of Jaynes, Einstein, Bayes: A Rational Steel Katana....
The more I think about consciousness, the more I think it’s ridiculous to have anything but the sparsest take on how to consider it. We should eschew anthropocentrism (mind-centrism? mind projection?) at every step. While it may have some nasty-sounding consequences in areas like ethics, I can’t convince myself that conscious minds have any special place in the universe, for any reason. It’s this century’s answer to having the Earth at the centre of the universe.
To relate my point to the parable: I would say that if you have all the information about a brain-split—if you know the exact position and momentum of every particle at every point—but you’re still asking ‘yes, but when does one consciousness become two?’ then you’re asking a wrong question. The consequence of this is removing that central name tag called ‘+/-consciousness’ in your neural ‘attributes of consciousness’ network.
When you think about it, drawing a line around all your neurons etc and saying ‘this is me’ is ridiculous. What about the dead cells? or the cells that have no observable effect? how many neurons can I remove before you stop being ‘you’? If you claim there’s a ‘self’ inside your head that emerges, from all the wetware, unified and irreducible, you’re setting yourself up for impossible questions just like the poor Ebboreans. Difficult though it is, you have to drop the mind-centrism. Am I saying that consciousness is an illusion? That’s not how I’d put it – after all, illusions are things that minds perceive. But what is, is real. Consciousness is. It’s just not ‘special’. You have no more ‘weight’ than a copy of yourself that assembles itself at random for a fraction of a second in a distant galaxy. Sorry. (By this rationale, ‘zombies’ are a nonsense too. )
When you ask ‘Why is red red?’, for me you’ve already projected your mind onto the territory. Red isn’t red in the world. It’s red in your map as a result of how your brain entangles itself with photons at a certain wavelength—an artefact of evolution—and I don’t need to explain that any more than I need to explain why you want your eggs sunny side up. Don’t mistake confusion and gaps in our knowledge for mysticism.
Really good stuff, Eliezer. Why do I get the feeling that we won’t ever get to hear what the big wonderful theory was? I’m just on the last chapter of GEB, and I’ve really enjoyed it, but I’ve no doubt your final piece will be entirely your own—it certainly deserves to be. That said, I like the sound of Jaynes, Einstein, Bayes: A Rational Steel Katana....