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Consciousness is the only thing in the universe that cannot be an illusion (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

32 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'll start by acknowledging that this isn’t my idea, credit to Sam Harris. I also don’t know if this is even controversial, but I figured this would be a better place to post than in Showerthoughts.

By consciousness, I mean the subjective experience of what it feels like to be. As philosopher Thomas Nagel put it:

'An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.'

It’s at least conceivable that things like free will, the self, or even the entire universe could be an illusion. For all we know, we could be living in a simulation and nothing might be real. Even if you don’t believe that, there’s still a greater-than-zero chance you could be wrong. However, this doesn't apply to consciousness itself. Even if everything is just a hallucination, it remains an undeniable fact that it feels like something to hallucinate. To claim that consciousness could be an illusion is a self-contradictory statement as consciousness is where illusions appear.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

To claim that consciousness could be an illusion is a self-contradictory statement as consciousness is where illusions appear.

This sounds a lot like the "did the chicken come before the egg or the other way around" God is defined as the progenitor of existence, but if something preceded or even paralleled God before existence, then that would have to be the real God instead, based on the ontological definition. That was confusing, but I only mention it because if you could have a "consciousness" which perceives another consciousness as illusory, (like one I could download into a machine) then your own "awareness" is just as relatively illusory as the first one.

Like, the universe comes from God, and some would say that you can't have one without the other. And our perception of the world stems from a consciousness, and some would say you can't have one without the other. I just wanted to talk about the problems that arise when you form a recursive pattern with these foundational ideas. What is really behind consciousness? Can consciousness lie to you? Of course. Should you stop trusting your consciousness? Not completely, you would become a vegetable. Bed sores hurt.

I'm just kinda rambling, but thank you for posting this stimulating topic. This consciousness appreciates it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Well the idea of panpsychism suggests that consciousness is a fundamental part of the universe. That it's just a property of matter. It doesn't exactly argue, that it feels like something to be a rock, but that consciousness still lies even in rocks on a some level.

I don't exactly have an argument against that theory either, but it doesn't necessarily challenge the fact of individual human consciousness. It really does feel like something to be me. Maybe my consciousness is just a slice of something greater, but the window I experience it thru is very real. For all we know, that "something which existed before God" could just as well be the person running the simulation. Then again something probably existed before that too, and so on..