Comment on Our understanding of reality might be a result of the way cousciousness works
ageedizzle@piefed.ca 2 weeks agoNo. No one is suggesting that it’s magic. One popular idea is that consciousness is an irreducible and fundamental (and, crucially, nonphysical) constituent of the universe. It must still follow laws even if this was the case, because it works with such regularity in our day-to-day lives (certain wavelengths of light reliably produce the same colour experiences, etc) which wouldn’t be the case if there were no laws at play.
An analogy can be made here to electromagnetism. For a while it was thought that electricity and magnetism could be reduced to other physical forces. We now know that’s not true. Electromagnetism is one of the fundamental forces of nature. Its irreducible. Similarly: it was thought for a time that consciousness could be reduced to the physical. A growing number of researchers are now seeing that this can’t be done, so it might just be the case that consciousness is a fundamental constituent of the universe. Its nonphysical, and irreducible to anything but itself.
CannonFodder@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
If there’s a new force or field, then it’s still physical, it’s just unknown. But that’s not what you’re talking about, I think. It’s more like the notion of life, which is self organizing matter - which appears at first to go against the laws of entropy. But we can see how a chance configuration that self replicates is a natural phenomenon and actually accelerates entropy in the longer term. Life is still physical even though we can describe it as a concept that might seem to transcend physicality. Consciousness can just be the same. And yes, you can consider consciousness as some sort of other fundamental order, but it’s not scientific - it specifically cannot be since we can not measure it.
ageedizzle@piefed.ca 2 weeks ago
That depends how you define your terms, but under most definitions I don’t think that this is always going to be the case
I’m not taking about life, I’m talking about consciousness which is a separate topic
Why?
We can measure it indirectly (eg by people telling us about their conscious experiences) which is good enough for empirical study
CannonFodder@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
People explaining their own consciousness is really not good enough. Simple llm ai systems can do that. I’m pretty sure that dogs are conscience, but we can never get their perspective. You cannot know anyone other than yourself is conscious.
ageedizzle@piefed.ca 2 weeks ago
There is a lot of data that is out of reach (such as the experience of a dog) but we can generalize from the data we do have access to and see if we can pick up any meaningful patterns and then generalize from there. That’s how all science is done