Comment on Fear not, and enjoy this mere interlude to its fullest!
Redex68@lemmy.world 5 months agoI don’t believe in God nor am I religious, but consciousness just feels so fucking weird man. Everything in the world can be explained through science and physics, cause and effect, hell even our brains and actions are just a chain of atoms interacting. But consciousness just feels so out of place. Why am I? Why am I even aware of my own existence? Why has a set of atoms resulted in my non-material consciousness? It feels so out of place. Why isn’t it just a bunch of atoms bumping into eachother, why am I capable of feeling and thinking?
I think about this more than anything in those quiet “run the brain’s existential dread garbage collection routine” moments.
Self aware consciousness is just so wild. Like you say, how does it even exist? But it’s also so common on our little planet here (even if we only count the humans) that it is as commonplace as it is spectacular.
It feels like this magical “extra” thing, but at the same time the evidence kinda suggests it’s just something that naturally happens once you get complex life.
The weirdest thing to me is that it’s literally impossible to measure and detect whether something has consciousness. Every other thing in our universe can be measured theoretically, even if not by our current tools, but there is no way to confirm that someone else is experiencing what I am experiencing currently. It’s just so weird.
You might find some answers in Julian Jaynes The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
Short version: consciousness is kind of new. We aren’t really good at it.
Also, Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright is very good. Less about Buddhism more about how we think and why it works.
I think it’s important to point out that the bicameral mind is one theory, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. One of its major criticisms is that it suggests consciousness only arose in humans around the time we started writing about it, and that it didn’t exist in humans before then. It’s also entirely possible that humans were conscious way before that, but when we started writing about it was just when we developed the cultural concept of what consciousness is.
The theory also seems to imply there is something special about human metacognitive processes compared to other animals, which would therefore imply that animals are not conscious. That seems weirdly reductive when various non-human animals show some evidence of self-awareness (mirror spot test, Alex the grey parrot).
It’s a nice theory which ties lots of things together, but it’s no more true than any other theory of consciousness at the moment.
Correct. In the case of the question, I believe there is value to be gained, even if there are flaws in the argument.
I was really curious to check out that first book after your short version.
But damn, the subject matter of that second book might draw my attention first. The Buddhist approach & techniques made so much sense to me in a completely pragmatic way.
I might have to order myself physical copies of both of these to read outside by my koi pond on cool fall days. The fact that the whole scene will be so on the nose to the point of being cliched will just amuse me further, lol.
Thanks for the recommendations!
I got a lot out of Wright’s book and I continue to revisit it.
It is a slow read that demands your attention, but it is very enlightening.
Wilco@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
You are the construct of a million cells, an evolutionary “trick” that allows all the pieces to act as one. Your task is to percieve your environment and survive in it.
Redex68@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Sure, I get the biology and technical aspect of it and I can understand that something could evolve whose atoms would move in such a way that it results in an object that is capable of responding dynamically to its roundings, plan and think. But for that collection of atoms to then result in this experience, I feel is extraordinarily exceptional.