
Is Consciousness an Illusion? - pepys
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/03/09/is-consciousness-an-illusion-dennett-evolution/
======
ThomPete
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.

~~~
atomical
What is the reality?

~~~
danbruc
Not OP, but of course physics. Not that this is necessarily the ultimate
answer, there may as well be yet another layer, a layer explaining why physics
is the way it is. But strictly speaking that would probably still be physics.
This is of course also pretty dangerous, one easily ends up with an infinity
of layers, each trying to explain the layer above.

It ultimately comes down to questions like why is there anything at all. But
those seem way out of reach at the moment and maybe they will remain forever.
Being part of what you are trying to study may obstruct your view in an
unsurmountable way.

~~~
btmorex
You could just as easily say that consciousness is all that exists and the
physical universe is the illusion. There is no objective reality.

~~~
danbruc
That changes just what reality is, what thing you are trying to understand. It
is no longer something outside and independent of your mind but your mind
itself and the things within it. Your mind would become the objectively real
thing and you could still study the structure of your consciousness, of your
experiences, what causes the regularities in them we call the laws of physics
and so on.

We essentially just decided to ignore most of such possibilities most of the
time, from solipsism as you mentioned over Last Thursdayism [1] to living in a
simulation or the Matrix. They may seem interesting to ponder about at times
but in the end they just prevent you from learning anything at all. You can
always come up with a strange scenario in which anything you might believe
turns out to be falls.

That certainly sounds kind of arbitrary and unscientific, but without some
founding assumptions about reality you get nowhere and that is of course not
helpful at all. We should certainly keep an eye on those assumption and we do,
living in a simulation for example pops up quite frequently, but for the
moment our success seems to justify our assumptions.

[1] The world came into existence last Thursday in precisely the state of last
Thursday with all the memories and evidence of the time before last Thursday
just to fool us.

------
neom
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...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H9ul7pqezs&list=PLKy-B3Qf_RDVn61ogKUR2lEHV0dGmWUc8)

And The Neuroscience of Consciousness – with Anil Seth is really great:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRel1JKOEbI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRel1JKOEbI)

Information, Evolution, and intelligent Design - With Daniel Dennett:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZX6awZq5Z0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZX6awZq5Z0)

~~~
veli_joza
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.

------
Aardwolf
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.

~~~
beefield
>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.

~~~
narag
_it feels obvious that I have conscience, but how do you prove or disprove
that claim?_

Why do you need to prove the obvious?

 _It feels obvious that earth is flat_

It doesn't if you climb a mountain or see a ship under the horizon. It's a
very thin layer of "obviousness" that disappears with very little reasoning.

There's nothing similar for consciousness, on the contrary every argument that
has been tried against it feels terribly clumsy and artificial.

~~~
otikik
The question already has uses. It is worth asking ourselves wether other
animals are conscious. It is worth asking ourselves whether a human phoetus is
conscious. And sooner or later we will need to ask ourselves wether machines
are conscious.

~~~
narag
The first two questions are tricky. The third is really the reason we're
reading about consciousness so often. But I'm not sure that questioning
consciousness reality itself is so useful to replicate it.

------
coldtea
The very notion doesn't even make sense.

Illusion presupposes consciousness.

~~~
GavinMcG
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13791547)

~~~
coldtea
But there's nothing in that passage to counter what I said. Illusion still
needs some conscious entity to be fooled.

Besides, the idea that: "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."

That's again a certain, centuries old, epistemology. And not a very good one.
I would be better if he would have said "is best approximated" rather than
"accurately represented".

------
kordless
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.

------
lafay
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.

------
manyoso
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.

~~~
ThomPete
first person evidence doesen't lead you anywhere. Its a = a, true but quite
trivial.

~~~
jnicholasp
It does when the question is, "Does first person evidence exist?"

~~~
CuriouslyC
First person evidence obviously does exist (unless I'm responding to a
philosophical zombie), the problem is that it is cannot be verified by an
outside observer. I suppose you could say that something only becomes evidence
when externally verified, but my response to that is that you have no way of
knowing if that external verification is real or just a figment of your
imagination, so that external verification doesn't really get you anywhere.

~~~
otikik
You could very be a philosophical zombie yourself, just one programmed by
evolution to experience consciousness. That's the argument as far as I
understand it.

------
psyc
The user-illusion metaphor is a central idea in Donald Hoffman's work. I'm not
sure who borrowed it from whom.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY)

------
danbruc
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.

~~~
rocqua
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.

~~~
danbruc
That is certainly a point of view I would agree with, but that is not what I
meant. I did not mean how the structure forms but how the structure becomes
conscious and self-aware. Let me try to explain with a though experiment,
assuming humans are purely physical.

You build a human-like robot with cameras, and microphones and actuators. You
also build a gigantic mechanical computer out of gears and hook up the sensors
and actuators of the robot to the mechanical computer. Finally you run a
quantum mechanical simulation of a human brain and nerve system on the
mechanical computer.

Shouldn't the whole thing now be equivalent to a human? Shouldn't it be
conscious and self-aware? This then raises the question, when and how did the
gears stop to just turn according to simple rules and became a mind capable of
exploring and thinking about the world? There seems to be some kind of large
jump between mindless rotating gears and becoming aware of you own existence.
I have a hard time making really precise what I mean, but I hope you get the
idea.

~~~
rocqua
I'd say that such a 'philosophical' zombie would indeed be conscious. In fact,
I'd call it human.

As for how it arose, I'd posit a theory: As an animal starts modeling others,
at some point it's model includes the others are also modeling others. Now,
combine this with that animal (and the others) also modeling themselves. At
some point, probably during collaboration, it starts becoming useful to start
reconciling these models with each other by communicating about them.

Now, reconciling models about a third party is already a big step, but
essentially speculation. At some point though, someone might want to reconcile
their model of you with your own model of yourself. After all, your model is
probably a better source of truth. This requires phrases like: "I think that",
"I wanted", perhaps even "I wondered".

Interestingly, this account of consciousness is rooted very deeply in the
'second-person'. It is very much a social construct. I'd also like to point
out this is naught but a hypothesis.

~~~
danbruc
There is probably some truth in the mind being a result of social interaction.
If you read about feral children, a common theme seems to be that those
children end up somewhat like animals lacking essential human characteristics.

 _I 'd say that such a 'philosophical' zombie would indeed be conscious. In
fact, I'd call it human._

I don't think those two are compatible. A philosophical zombie lacks
consciousness, sentience, and qualia, a human does not. And I don't see why
this collection of gears should lack any of them, why it should be a
philosophical zombie. Those gear should feel pain, and not in the sense that
the positions of some of those gears indicate that there is pain, like a bit
in a computer memory, but just like you and me experience pain.

And that seems, at least to me, a gigantic leap. I can perfectly understand
how you could evaluate different sensor inputs, calculate a pain level, and
store it somewhere in memory. And then you could easily create reactions, try
to get away from whatever causes you pain, you could make the robot scream.

But that seems nothing like how I experience pain, I really feel it. Humans
don't even need external sources of pain, we can experience pain from memories
and thoughts alone. Admittedly that may be an artificial distinction, one
could certainly imagine a kind of internal sensor input that does not sense
external stimuli but the state of other parts of your brain.

But all that doesn't help, at least me, at all understanding why I can feel
pain and what it means to feel pain in the first place. I can not make the
jump from a physical and inanimate picture of a human made out of particles to
how it feels to be a human. I can not understand how a collection of gears
could possibly feel pain.

And when I say not understand I mean it in the most powerful way. It's not
that I can not understand the details, it's not that I don't understand
anything about it but know how I could learn about it, it's much worse, I can
not even imagine how I could possibly try to understand it.

------
kylek
The idea of the illusion is not really a new one:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_(illusion)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_\(illusion\))
.

~~~
cscurmudgeon
That is completely different though. Hinduism states that other than
consciousness everything else is an illusion.

------
rocqua
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.

------
visarga
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.

------
dreamlayers
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.

------
coliveira
If rats could talk they would say they have consciousness. This is not a human
trait as even some philosophers seem to believe.

------
hhhahds
If you ask me, the idea that consciousness is an illusion is an illusion...huh

------
api
Doesn't an illusion imply a consciousness to experience the illusion?

------
kerkeslager
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.

~~~
manyoso
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.

~~~
simonh
Is that a critique of the few sentences in the post you're replying to, or a
considered rebuttal of your reading of the content of the book?

~~~
manyoso
It is a critique of the criticism of the review. If the review is wrong and
Dennett's point is really just the standard materialistic worldview plus the
trivial observation that consciousness evolved according to Darwin's laws,
then it is really trifling.

~~~
rocqua
I'd expect the book to contain well thought-out non-obvious conclusions from
those rather obvious assumptions. Perhaps expanded by giving examples of
potential underlying mechanisms.

------
carsongross
If it is, is this an indictment of consciousness? Or of illusion?

------
fdik
If consciousness is an illusion, who is it falling for it?

~~~
GavinMcG
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."

~~~
coldtea
> _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. "_

They are also mediated by consciousness. Unconscious scientists rarely do
experiments or interpret their results.

This is epistemology 101.

~~~
kerkeslager
The underlying reality is absolutely not mediated by human consciousness, and
I think the author's mistake here is even bringing up the human scientific
fields, which muddies their point.

Dennett does end up explaining a lot of epistemology 101 because his audience
isn't philosophy academia.

Dennett's innovation, which isn't described well by this book review, is to
assert that epistemology is driven by reproductive pressure (both genetic and
memetic).

~~~
manyoso
How is that an innovation?!

Materialists have been asserting since forever that consciousness arises from
the brain and that the brain evolved according to Darwin's laws. What is _new_
in Dennett's viewpoint?

~~~
kerkeslager
Dennett goes into a lot more detail as to the processes by which evolution
affects consciousness and the resulting properties of consciousness than
anyone in my (admittedly limited) reading.

------
xcodevn
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.

------
anon0
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...](https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-mystery-of-
consciousness)

------
doener
>MARCH 9, 2017 ISSUE

That's from the future!

------
transfire
No.

------
FeepingCreature
No.

~~~
dwringer
No, you're an illusion!

