I agree that "consciousness is different to just having a model of the world and self within it" indeed. I'm just saying it feels like that modelling ability (which has clear and major evolutionary advantages) is a step towards consciousness, indeed something in the now (as we experience it). A (near) real-time model perhaps that constantly projects and adjusts. I guess this still doesn't require consciousness, but maybe consciousness results from this? Does it require a sense of "now" and identity relative to the world model?
Mixing consciousness with cognition is a mistake, Imagine a conscious experience of constant redness and nothing else, is there any intelligence needed for this?
The reason why this is likely not possible is because consciousness appears to require a notion of time passing by and having a constant experience means that there is no time.
For time to exist some sort of motion is needed, including either internal motion like the perception of breathing or a heartbeat or a train of thought or external ones like a clock or a change of color from red to blue.
We have no way of knowing whether there is any time even with the "notion of time passing", as that notion depends on a notion of memory of a past, and we have no way of knowing if that is real, including whether or not there is a train of thought or any change.
I don't think so. The point being that we can't tell whether we're having a "constant experience" or not, and we can't tell from that whether or not there's any time or no time, or punctuated time, nor can we for that matter tell whether consciousness requires any notion of time.
It's all pure speculation because we have no way of assessing it outside of our own frame of reference. E.g. I see you in another answer saying that "the fact is that all kinds of state changes happen", but we don't know if any state changes ever happen.
We have no way of telling a dynamic universe apart from a static one where we're all just suspended in a single unchanging moment.
We can choose to handwave a lot of this away ordinarily because as long as the experience is reasonably consistent it makes sense to assume it is objectively real, because we have nothing better. It doesn't matter if the world didn't exist a second ago when e.g. considering whether gravity work, because it appears as if it did.
But when trying to determine the nature of consciousness we run headlong into the fact our observation of consciousness is direct only in the case of ourself, and even then heavily limited. We have no direct measure that puts us in a position to prove consciousness even in other people. We can show that within our perceived world we can measure brain activity that correlates to though, but not whether that reflects merely the operation of an automata, or the existence of consciousness, or if there is a distinction at all.
As such, it's meaningless to suggest we have a way of saying much about the limitations of consciousness at all.
If the universe is static, then there is no "repeatably observable causality" or indeed any causality at all. In that scenario any perception of time and causality would inherently have to just be our perception lying to us about a past that we have had not part in, if it exist in any sense at all. If so, we have not had this conversation, and your experience of it is just a static momentary perception of having had it.
Maybe time is a spatial dimension, and there are infinite moments of consciousness fixed in the same spatial location with no time passing.
Consider how you'd tell if a drawing is an individual drawing or a frame from a cartoon if all you have to go by is that single frame. You can argue that the drawing hints convincingly at motion, but that does not require that this motion has taken place.
Or consider a trace of a simulation, sliced and diced into snapshots of individual moments. We can argue that it's unlikely any entities in such snapshots would have consciousness, but if we're arguing on the basis that we appear to experience the motion of time, we'd equally make that argument if we were wrong about consciousness and indeed locked in snapshots of individual moments. We can even construct simulations where individual parts look causally connected but where the existence of one calculated frame tells us nothing about whether any individual other frames have even ever been instantiated (e.g. imagine a very complex function over time, where only punctuated values have ever been calculated).
I'm not saying I believe that is our situation - I'm saying we can't distinguish between that and an infinite set of other possible options, because "from the inside" there is an infinite set of possibilities that could all look the same from our vantage point. We can debate which possibilities seem more likely, but they will always be speculation as long as we're locked inside the asylum, so to speak...
Incidentally, this is an argument for a materialistic view of the universe, not against it, on the basis that absent a way of "peeking out" and seeing our situation from the outside, it's meaningless to treat the world as anything but what we measure and perceive - it doesn't matter whether or not this world is what it seems like to us or not as long as it is the only view we have of it. We just can't say if it is some inherently true objective view of the universe, and most likely it won't make any difference to us.
It only makes a difference when we tinker with philosophy around the edges, like these conversations about whether what we experience can tell us anything about the experience of other entities.
> If the universe is static, then there is no "repeatably observable causality" or indeed any causality at all. In that scenario any perception of time and causality would inherently have to just be our perception lying to us about a past that we have had not part in, if it exist in any sense at all
Is it possible to have perception in a static environment? It seems like perception requires flux of some sort.
Clarification: meaning the machinery of the perceiver must have flux, otherwise it's not perception, it's just static state.
Is it? If we are in a static environment, then it would mean it is possible, and that this intuition is wrong. Since we don't have a way of determining experimentally if is wrong or not, then at least for now it does not even help us quantify the odds. If we're not in a static environment, then maybe, maybe not - we don't know what the subject experience of consciousness is at all.
We so far have no way of splitting perception or conscience down in slices of ever shorter moments to see where it stops being whatever it is and becomes something "inert", but even if we did, we would not know whether that was an inherent limitation of objective reality or of our subjective reality and whether those two are the same or not.
IMO those are details, we could drop the constatness and just ask - what is required to have a single moment of redness? Or even simpler, a single moment of one tingle.
BTW experienced mediators apperently can experience no time and no space, no idea how that tastes like.
I think it's arguable that this "conscious experience of nothing but constant redness" might not be actually possible. We can imagine it, of course, but we can also imagine many things that can't actually exist in the world. It's similar to the idea about p-zombies: just because a concept exists doesn't mean it's physically realizable.
It's very much possible that what we would call consciousness can only exist in certain types of minds that have a particular level of intelligence, but also a particular structure.
Of course, it's also possible that you're right and the two are entirely separate, and that consciousness doesn't require intelligence (and possibly vice-versa).
Good question, being investigated in the field of consciousness studies. Like Thomas Metzinger's minimal phenomenal selfhood: https://youtu.be/8f4ykI9har8
I think all these term are too loaded and deep to answer your question, almost all words in the sentences we exchange are subject to subtle interpretation and definition differences.
I still enjoy the process though, which perhaps also doesn't require consciousness, yet here I am.
At least when it comes to human level consciousness, I agree it's something 'more than', but what exactly?
If we look at our advancing world models in things like self driving cars, when would we consider them conscious by our own rules? It has a sensor network that keeps track of it's own internal states. It has external sensors that monitor the external world and adjust it's internal state. The internal state attempts to predict future states and take actions to avoid negative outcomes.
So when does this loop become something we consider consciousness?
I feel like the matrix is about the eject me btw.
Thanx, I'm looking for Harris' books right now.