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ChristianKl comments on Open Thread for February 11 - 17 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: Coscott 11 February 2014 06:08PM

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Comment author: ChristianKl 14 February 2014 12:58:00AM 1 point [-]

It depends on whether you subscribe to materialism. If you do then there nothing to measure. Conscious might even be a tricky illusion as Dennett suggests.

If on the other hand you do believe that there something beyond materialism there are plenty of frameworks to choose from that provide ideas about what one could measure.

Comment author: mwengler 14 February 2014 08:33:11PM 0 points [-]

If on the other hand you do believe that there something beyond materialism there are plenty of frameworks to choose from that provide ideas about what one could measure.

OMG then someone should get busy! Tell me what I can measure and if it makes any kind of sense I will start working on it!

Comment author: ChristianKl 15 February 2014 02:36:47AM *  0 points [-]

I do have a qualia for perceiving whether someone else is present in a meditation or is absent minded. It could be that it's some mental reactions that picks up microgestures or some other thing that I don't consciously perceive and summarizes that information into a qualia for mental presence.

Investigating how such a qualia works is what I would do personally when I would want to investigate consciousness.

But you probably have no such qualia, so you either need someone who has or develop it yourself. In both cases that probably means seeking a good meditation teacher.

It's a difficult subject to talk about in a medium like this where people who are into a spiritual framework that has some model of what conscious happens to be have phenomenological primitives that the audience I'm addressing doesn't have. In my experience most of the people who I consider capable in that regard are very unwilling to talk about details with people who don't have phenomenological primitives to make sense of them. Instead of answering a question directly a Zen teacher might give you a koan and tell you to come back in a month when you build the phenomenological primitives to understand it, expect that he doesn't tell you about phenomenological primitives.