Lightwave comments on Confused as to usefulness of 'consciousness' as a concept - Less Wrong

35 Post author: KnaveOfAllTrades 13 July 2014 11:01AM

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Comment author: solipsist 17 July 2014 02:00:08AM 7 points [-]

For example, insisting that destructive uploaders are perfectly okay with no downside to the person stepping inside one. I finally decided to update and rate more likely the possibility that others do not experience consciousness in the same way I do.

I'm inclined to disagree, but you might be one level beyond me. I believe many people empathize with a visceral sense of horror about (say) destructive teleportation, but intellectually come to the conclusion that those anxieties are baseless. These people may argue in a way that appears dense, but they are actually using second-level counterarguments. But perhaps you actually have counter-counter arguments, and I would appear to be dense when discussing those.

Argument in a nutshell:

Sleep might be a Lovecraftian horror. As light in front of you dims, your thoughts become more and more disorganized, and your sense of self fades until the continuation of consciousness that is you ceases to exist. A few hour later someone else wakes up who thinks that they were you. But they are not you. Every night billions of day-old consciousnesses die, replaced the next morning with billion more, deluded by borrowed memories into believing that they will live for more than a few hours. After a you next go to sleep, you will never see colors again.

People who have never slept would be terrified of sleeping. People who have never teleported are terrified of teleporting. The two fears are roughly equal in merit.

Comment author: Lightwave 17 July 2014 08:13:54AM 2 points [-]

Sleep might be a Lovecraftian horror.

Going even further, some philosophers suggest that consciousness isn't even continuous, e.g. as you refocus your attention, as you blink, there are gaps that we don't notice. Just like how there are gaps in your vision when you move your eyes from one place to another, but to you it appears as a continuous experience.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 17 July 2014 11:17:29AM *  4 points [-]

Consciousness is complex. It is a structured thing, not an indivisible atom. It is changeable, not fixed. It has parts and degrees and shifting, uncertain edges.

This worries some people.

Comment author: [deleted] 17 July 2014 04:29:46PM 2 points [-]

Well of course it worries people! Precisely the function of consciousness (at least in my current view) is to "paint a picture" of wholeness and continuity that enables self-reflective cognition. Problem is, any given system doesn't have the memory to store its whole self within its internal representational data-structures, so it has to abstract over itself rather imperfectly.

The problem is that we currently don't know the structure, so the discord between the continuous, whole, coherent internal feeling of the abstraction and the disjointed, sharp-edged, many-pieced truth we can empirically detect is really disturbing.

It will stop being disturbing about five minutes after we figure out what's actually going on, when everything will once again add up to normality.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 17 July 2014 07:35:22PM 4 points [-]

Well of course it worries people!

It seems to only worry people when they notice unfamiliar (to them) aspects of the complexity of consciousness. Familiar changes in consciousness, such as sleep, dreams, alcohol, and moods, they never see a problem with.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 17 July 2014 05:22:42PM 1 point [-]

We only ever have approxmate models of external things, too.