
The nature of our experience of reality remains elusive - Hooke
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/07/how-crack-consciousness
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pmoriarty
Almost the entire article is biased towards Analytic philosophy.. as if that's
all there was in philosophy. Only in a couple of paragraphs does the author
acknowledge the fact that Continental philosophers had anything to say on
consciousness.

 _" Phenomenology bodied-forth most notably in the existentialism of Simone de
Beauvoir, and, to a lesser extent, that of Sartre and Camus."_

In fact, the most significant phenomenologist post Husserl was Heidegger. It
was he and Merleau-Ponty who had the most to say about consciousness. The
author does not even mention them.

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olivermarks
Could there be a more pretentious article title than 'How to crack
consciousness'?

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smilespray
It’s a Will Self article. Par for the course.

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olivermarks
I used to enjoy his early musings but he is spectacularly jumping the shark
regularly these days...

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carapace
Out of one eye the world seems blue-er, while out of the other it seems red-
er.

I must be slightly off in one eye, but I don't know which.

Or maybe _both_ eyes are off.

But of course, _both eyes are off_. There is no redness in the world nor
blueness. When I look out through both at the same time I see the "same"
colors of things, even though each eye individually reports slightly different
colors.

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quotemstr
Why is this subject so fraught? The brain is a wet computer. Reality is its
internal model of the external world informed by imperfect sensory inputs.
Consciousness is what thinking feels like. When the brain ceases to function,
the individual is destroyed. So what? There's no mystery here. The knowledge
to be gained has to do with the operation of the brain, not the nature of
"consciousness", whatever that is.

As far as I'm concerned, after Wittgenstein, philosophy has had nothing to do.
All the "big questions" are either answerable scientifically as a matter of
neurology or they're ill-posed and nonsensical.

Actually, I'm wrong: philosophy does have an occupation these days. It's
complicit in the creation of utter nonsense like continental thought and
critical theory, all of which amounts of sophistry that justifies us in
exercising our world impulses toward magical thinking.

Why bother?

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PhearTheCeal
>The brain is a wet computer.

>Consciousness is what thinking feels like.

Do you think computers are conscious?

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quotemstr
Sufficiently smart ones, certainly. I've seen no evidence that we've built one
yet, but we will eventually, and when we do, I'd ascribe exactly as much
consciousness to a computer as I do to a human.

I don't believe "p zombies" exist --- or, rather, I believe we're all p
zombies.

~~~
fiatjaf
So you believe in things without evidence that they exist? That's very
scientific of you.

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21
If I believe that aliens exist somewhere in the universe, is that
unscientific?

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nradov
Yes belief in aliens is unscientific. There's nothing wrong with such a belief
but no matter how you dress it up with Drake Equation calculations it's
equivalent to a religious belief taken on faith.

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21
So the vast majority of physicists which believed that the Higgs would be
found were also acting like on a religious belief taken on faith.

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nradov
That's not how it works. Most physicists didn't literally "believe" in the
Higgs boson. Instead they expected it to be found based on the Standard Model
_theory_ of particle physics. That theory has been extensively validated over
decades by thousands of physicists performing thousands of experiments. When a
theory has been extensively validated then it has some predictive power.

On the other hand there is no _theory_ about alien life, only a bunch of
speculative hypotheses.

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sarreph
> When I read philosophy at Oxford in the early 1980s there wasn’t a lot of
> talk about consciousness.

Is it really necessary to put your prestigious alma mater in the first line?

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komali2
A lot of things in this article have made me wish for some sort of literary
brutalism movement. Even now, after second read, I'm not exactly sure what the
purpose of the article was, or the author's goal in me reading it. It's also
littered with a bunch of commad and parenthesised asides that I didn't get the
point of.

Not that I didn't find it interesting, just, I feel it could have gotten the
job done cleaner.

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AndrewKemendo
I like that term: Literary Brutalism.

I think it's crucially needed, as the volume of content out there worth
reading is massive. Unfortunately, non-fiction authors are told to write in
narrative form (narrative non-fiction) by editors because that seems to be
what sells best and is most engaging.

On the other side are mathematical papers which QED and ibid their way to
illegibility.

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ddtaylor
This title really reads like something from The Onion.

