
The Grand Illusion:  Why consciousness exists only when you look for it (2002) - monort
http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/journalism/ns02.htm
======
lamacase
I don't see that it matters whether consciousness is "actual" or "illusory"
(whatever that distinction entails) for the purposes of explaining subjective
experience. The degree to which that experience reflects, or fails to
reflects, physical reality is certainly interesting but I don't see it
changing the nature of the problems.

"Instead of asking how neural impulses turn into conscious experiences, we
must ask how the grand illusion gets constructed."

I really don't see what the difference is. How are we to interpret the notion
that, say, the color Orange is really just a "trick"? Some sleight of mind
perhaps?

What point was the author trying to make?

~~~
seszett
> _How are we to interpret the notion that, say, the color Orange is really
> just a "trick"?_

That might not seem important today, now we know what colour is in terms of
physics and the only remaining unknown might be how we internally perceive it,
but the nature of colour was a real question at one time, and trying to
understand it ended up improving our knowledge of physics.

Trying to understand consciousness, however pointless you might think the
difference between an actual consciousness and one constructed on the fly is,
could very well lead to interesting discoveries as well, eventually. It's also
interesting to know in itself.

------
satori99
As soon as I saw this headline, I knew it would be Susan Blackmore. I once saw
her give a talk on this topic, among others, at The Australian Museum. She is
a remarkable speaker and was brutally honest about her own less-than-
scientific past in researching human consciousness;

> It was just over thirty years ago that I had the dramatic out-of-body
> experience that convinced me of the reality of psychic phenomena and
> launched me on a crusade to show those closed-minded scientists that
> consciousness could reach beyond the body and that death was not the end.
> Just a few years of careful experiments changed all that. I found no psychic
> phenomena - only wishful thinking, self-deception, experimental error and,
> occasionally, fraud. I became a skeptic.

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jpasden
One of my problems with conceptualizing "consciousness" and ideas such as
"attention" or "unconscious processes" is that I have such a fondness for
analogies that I am forever trying to find the proper one, and it inevitably
comes down to some kind of computer-based analogy like the memory management
example given in the article.

Instinctively, I find it absurd that the human brain should work similarly to
how human-created computer systems work, and that these analogies should be
tossed out, but maybe it actually does make a kind of sense? Is there a
convergent evolution occurring whereby we will eventually come to understand
human consciousness because the more we improve our computer systems, the
closer we come to approximating the fundamental "thinking powers" of the human
brain?

~~~
teekert
A computer is deterministic, it operates by a set of understandable rules. We
know that for sure. For our brain, we don't know. biology is mostly stochastic
(unless it has evolved to obtain a certain level of deterministicness). It is
difficult to replicate in a machine. But I think humans have a very strong
sense that there must be a deeper set of rules that operates our brain and
constructs consciousness. Therefor, the creation of a computer with
consciousness would prove a certain set of rules exists, and we can understand
those rules, even though a computer (as a computer is today) does not function
at all like a brain. "What I cannot create, I do not understand" (Feynman),
apparently we don't care if the mechanism behind the created thing is
different in this case. So I think the lesson learned will be that
consciousness can follow from a set of rules but less about how our own
consciousness works. Who says there can be only one kind?

------
dm2
I think that it would be good to start with evolution to attempt to pinpoint
the different stages that consciousness was created.

[http://www.princeton.edu/~graziano/Graziano_JCN_2014.pdf](http://www.princeton.edu/~graziano/Graziano_JCN_2014.pdf)
"Speculations on the Evolution of Awareness" \- Michael Graziano

"selective signal enhancement" is an interesting concept.

[http://www.princeton.edu/~graziano/Consciousness_Research.ht...](http://www.princeton.edu/~graziano/Consciousness_Research.html)

[http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/how-consciousness-
works/](http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/how-consciousness-works/)

~~~
themgt
Wow. The author of that has published numerous papers on neuroscience and
consciousness, has written well-received adult literature, award-winning
children's books, popular science nonfiction books, passable orchestra music,
papers on fake universes modeling emergent laws of physics and he's "an avid
practitioner of ventriloquism and performs his art with a monkey sidekick
named Kevin"

[http://www.princeton.edu/~graziano/](http://www.princeton.edu/~graziano/)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Graziano](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Graziano)

I feel quite lazy now.

~~~
dm2
Thanks for the link to his blog. I always forget to check those for full
papers, I updated my post with a link to the PDF.

Yeah, he's certainly contributed a lot to consciousness research.
[http://www.princeton.edu/~graziano/MG_Vita.pdf](http://www.princeton.edu/~graziano/MG_Vita.pdf)

I've done a lot of thinking and discussing around brain-transfers and what it
requires, I'm really interested in reading his papers around that topic, and
some of the others.

------
fdik
If consciousness is an illusion, then ego is an illusion as well.

Who is it then, who is succumbing to this illusion?

------
renatofdds
"The User Illusion" by Tor Nørretranders is a must read for anyone interested
in the subject. One of the best books i've ever read.

------
seszett
Hmm... that's not directly related to main topic of the article, but I read:

 _You hadn 't noticed it before, but now that you have, you know that the
clock has struck four times already, and you can go on counting_

Does that really happen? I am never able to do that, each time the church's
clock strikes and I want to know what time it is, I can never be sure if I
have missed one or two strikes at the beginning, and I often do miss one (and
there is no mean to determine how many could have been missed). I thought that
was the same for everyone, and the reason why it strikes again two minutes
after the first time, so you can be ready to count.

Other than that, the article is pretty much how I had been thinking of
consciousness already.

------
dschiptsov
The precise wording is crucial here. It is "the self" \- the notion of
persistent, continuous "I am" is this "grand illusion". Some ancient Indian
and later Tibetan scholars have written about it since 7th century's "doctrine
boom" and following "age of the great translation" (of Indian texts into
Tibetan language), which resulted in all that plurality of Tibetan sects,
while "the realization" of the illusory nature of what we call "I" goes back
to the times of Upanishads, long before the Buddha himself.

In modern words, what we call "consciousness" is mere a set of processes,
which could be switched on and off.)

~~~
nonzetsu
no! there is suboff for subconscious

------
unclebucknasty
It's a weird question because, for me, it starts too far up the chain.
Consciousness is a question of subjective perception, but I cannot yet truly
define the actual things that I perceive.

So, as I look at my screen, I can acknowledge its existence and repeat stuff
I've learned about about atoms, elements, etc. But, when I truly start to
question how this physical world is held together and what proof we have that
it even exists beyond, say, a simulation, then I fail.

There is some fundamental level at which I'm not "certain" of _anything_. So,
how can I begin to ask questions about how I _perceive_ those things?

~~~
collyw
Science requires a fair amount of faith. Its not like you can repeat every
experiment.

~~~
unclebucknasty
Yeah, I'm talking about something a little different.

------
smegel
Even if it is an illusion, so what? It doesn't stop me _experiencing_ it,
which is really what consciousness is all about.

 _I think, therefore I am_

~~~
stan_rogers
Or, _I think that I think, therefore I think that I am_. In some sense, at
least, it amounts to the same thing.

------
d-equivalence
I think the author of this article confuses consciousness for the
interpretation of things that occur in consciousness.

~~~
tehwalrus
Would you care to define a concrete difference between those two things?

~~~
d-equivalence
Dunno, maybe practice Zen Buddhism for a decade or two.

~~~
tehwalrus
I am a (lapsing) mindful meditator, and I'm still not sure this article
contradicts any of that stuff (which is the distilled science from things like
Buddhism.)

~~~
d-equivalence
I understand, but forgive me, when I try to argue about consciousness using
logic or read scientific studies about it, I always feel like being a 14 year
old talking about sex, so I don't talk about it anymore. I prefer doing it.

Quite possibly its arrogance, or jadedness. But I've come to develop my own
opinions about issues like that, through other means of acquiring knowledge
than science, which I feel is grossly inadequate to address such issues. And
no, I'm not talking about secular/clinic types of mindfulness.

Probably that makes me a weirdo in circles like HN, but oh well.

------
mikekchar
Writing on a topic that I know next to nothing :-) Hopefully it will provide
entertainment if nothing else.

I have thought recently that consciousness, or any phenomenon that includes
the awareness of the passage of time, is an illusion of memory. Imagine that
you have only an instantaneous existence. Over time you move from one instance
to another, changing state each time. In essence you are a state machine.

At any given instant, your new state depends on your current state and new
inputs (not only are you a state machine, but you are a regular expression!).
Unlike a state machine with a fixed set of states and an infinite tape, you
have a near infinite set of possible states and a finite tape. The way the
state is constructed, it is possible to reason about the likely path you took
to reach your current state. Of course, states you were in only a few
iterations ago are easy to deduce while states that you were in a long time
ago are much harder to deduce because there are many possible paths.

Finally, let's imagine that you can partition your state. In other words, you
can take a small part of your state (call it a sub-state) and you can deduce
past sub-states that you would have had to pass through in order to reach this
sub-state.

With this in place, "awareness" could merely be the act of enumeration past
possible sub-states. So you can "concentrate" on a sub-state and at any given
instant deduce the sub-states that have lead to this position.

Because your interface with reality would be the review of these possible past
sub-states, it would appear from your point of view that there was a flow of
occurrences that led to your current state. But all of the information you are
processing is internal and so your awareness would be dependent upon the
instantaneous state only.

You could get very silly and imagine that if your movement between states was
idempotent, that you could even execute the state machine out of order and it
would _still_ produce the same awareness of order and hence flow of time.

If this were to be the case (and I have no real reason to believe that it is
-- it's just an entertaining thought), I don't think it would be as discrete
as I describe it. If you consider a neural network, it has a similar kind of
state and a similar kind of "memory". Training the neural network creates
outputs from inputs based on what had previously been input. One might imagine
a kind of network that could walk backwards through "memorised" patterns by
feeding the outputs back into inputs, but I don't think any such thing exists
(and possibly it can't exist). Aside: I know about convoluted networks, but I
don't think they produce the effect I am describing.

Like I said, it's an interesting mental exercise, but not necessarily anything
like what really happens.

------
ExpiredLink
Consciousness has bee a philosophical topic for centuries. She is a
psychologist and obviously unaware of it.

~~~
nonzetsu
NO, EVEYBODY CAN LEARN ANYTHING WITHOUT DEGREE

PLUS PSYCHOLOGY HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH NEUROLOGY AT SOME POINT

~~~
ExpiredLink
It's a scientific principle to study the exiting body of knowledge, at least
the important works, before you publish your own theories and findings.

BTW, your keyboard seems to be broken.

------
crimsonalucard
We can't even properly define consciousness. Why ask whether or not something
exists when we're not even sure what the word consciousness is referring too.

Consciousness is similar to other loaded/ambiguous words in the English
language like "spirituality." Everybody has a different perception of what it
is, and nobody can really define it. Lots of female hipsters still like to
toss the word "spirituality" around while never really knowing what the hell
it means.

"Consciousness" on the other hand has a more scholarly philosophical flavor.
If you want to get into a meaningless pseudo-scientific discussion with no
logical end (and beginning), "consciousness" is the perfect word to guarantee
things will go nowhere. Like this article, for example.

~~~
redwood
What is your point? Are you saying there is no point to having words for
things that we don't fully understand?

Male hipsters too, btw.

~~~
crimsonalucard
I'm saying no point discussing it. Especially on HN.

Articles grounded in science are a better fit.

~~~
sriku
There is a lot of discussion about "functional programming" without a
consensus on what constitutes that and what are paraphernalia.

A notion exists in a word form when it has _some_ definition, even if it
cannot be articulated well. Here by "definition" I mean something like "the
ability to categorize examples even if fuzzily", i.e. saying that "a rock is
not conscious while a human is" already indicates the existence of a
definition. Note that this doesn't require that you be able to describe the
category in a nice precise sentence.

Through dialogue, critique, experiments, we can gradually construct a specific
sense for the word that a group of people can work on. Take "energy" for
instance. The word existed before physicists defined it precisely, and even
the definition within that domain evolved when quantum mechanics came around.
Furthermore, the usage of the word isn't limited to contexts in physics only.

Is it worthless to ponder "what might a physics definition of consciousness
be?".

~~~
crimsonalucard
Definitely not worthless to ponder "what might a physics definition of
consciousness be?"

But definitely utterly worthless to ponder "Is consciousness an illusion?"
without knowing the definition of consciousness.

~~~
cam_l
"Is consciousness an illusion?" _IS_ positing a definition of consciousness.

~~~
crimsonalucard
In the phrase "Is Life an illusion?" life is not being redefined as an
illusion. It is more of a categorization, similar to "Is an apple a fruit?"

Here's a ludicrous question: "Is spirituality a fruit?" Whatever feeling you
get when reading that phrase, it's the same feeling I get when reading the
title of this article.

~~~
cam_l
i see what you're saying, but i disagree with your premise. particularly in
light of both the article and the parent comments. consciousness is a defacto
categorisation because we cannot point to a distinct thing which defines it.

we have a shared understanding of consciousness which is separate from 'just'
life (ie.apes are conscious but plants are not) but also separate from merely
categorisation (ie.we think there are fundamental differences between
conscious and not conscious). like when a syndrome becomes a disease.. we are
looking for some thing we can point to and say this why we have this set of
symptoms.

but this article is suggesting is that possibly there actually is no
difference between conscious and not conscious, and that perhaps we are
looking for the wrong thing. that is, they are suggesting that consciousness
is not a thing, but an emergent illusion / experience.

