The function of consciousness?

If you don't want spoilers for pic related, don't read this I guess. I read the book after watching Peter Watts talk on this so you can still read the book but it is a major spoiler in the sense that it's probably the biggest reveal in the book. Here's the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uwaw_5Q3I Is consciousness a parasite? Is it necessary for the human body to go about its daily life? Peter Watts has an interesting take on the age old thought experiment of the philosophical zombie. In his book Blindsight, he makes use of this idea that maybe humans (and other entities) could function without consciousness but still act intelligently. That is, intelligence without comprehension just like a Chinese room. Watch the video I linked above to get a better understanding of what this is about. Now if consciousness is really as widespread as suggested in that talk, why is that so? The idea of all intelligent lifeforms being chinese rooms seems plausible and even more efficient to me. Is there some critical function consciousness performs or is it an emergent property with no fitness enhancing functions? Now recently I've started to "feel" as if it is my subconscious that is actually making ALL the decisions and my conscious experience of it is merely a story I tell myself. For example, I find myself in the store and I realize I don't actually need anything, I've just "zombiewalked" there. Or I'm talking to someone and I realize that even though my conscious intentions are good, the way things actually turn out are pretty selfish and it seems that even my genuine feelings are designed for manipulation of others ( this is discussed briefly in the book as well ). So even though I'm conscious, it is as if there still is a chinese room that is actually the thing in charge. Idk, can anybody relate to this? What are your thoughts on this crazy idea?

consciousness/comprehension is a byproduct of your prefrontal cortex. you could act intelligently without comprehending given that your instincts/database is already set from the knowledge given to you by your prefrontal cortex. maybe you have a false concept of consciousness. the only difference between AI and OI is hardware, technology made by evolution and technology made in attempt to replicate that.

consciousness is the particular way that humans have evolved communication. It would be hard to communicate things if you didn't have some concept of yourself and your experience, and the experience of others.

I don't have any answers but this hits on something I've been thinking for a while. The brain is just particles which follow the laws of physics. At that level, it's no different from a rock. So we really don't need any consciousness, we would behave exactly the same if we were "machines made of meat", so I do have a feeling consciousness could be just some extraneous thing that's along for the ride.

>>2366 I can imagine systems that "communicate" without comprehension. System A sends a signal to system B that then internally processes that signal via a series of logical circuits and then produces an appropriate output / response. Depending on the amount of logical circuits and their complexity, the signals could be arbitrarily complex. No subjective experience or conscious understanding needed. Just Chinese rooms processing signals. What the logic gates are made of doesn't seem to matter, it could be neurons, transistors, mechanical switches, or even minecraft redstone contraptions. Or maybe even entire cities, the internal structures of corporations and nations and so on.

>>2377 Human communication, and its terribly limited bandwidth and complex, often incomplete not totally coherent nature is a limiting factor in almost all systems of organization involving humans. It stands to reason that we are about as good at communication as rocks. We just like to believe we are better at it because our lives happen so fast relatively speaking. Playing a 1Kbit/s stream in fast forward by 3 orders of magnitude (approximately the difference in aging between a human and an median average rock) is the difference between pre dial up internet and modern fiber connections. Same communication bandwidth just different rate of playback.

>>2377 >just chinese rooms my take is that there is literally no difference between a chinese room and someone who speaks fluent chinese. >>2379 are you kidding me? natural language is wayyyy more dense and versatile than almost any mechanical encoding technique you can think of.

>>2388 > my take is that there is literally no difference between a chinese room and someone who speaks fluent chinese. What? Howcome? You're doing more than parsing this sentence and blindly finding some best answer out of a database of possible answers. You have comprehension on a conceptual level. Also I think >>2379 may have overstated his case. I think what he meant was something like "a series of grunts and noises cannot really convey the subjective experience effectively". Something similar to "A picture is worth a thousand words" or whatever. If I could directly link my brain to yours and make you "see" what I see, that would be way more effective than using my mouth to compress air in specific ways and let your brain make sense of that. I could be wrong, maybe he really is saying that we're just about as effective at communication as rocks.

>>2391 >What? Howcome? You're doing more than parsing this sentence and blindly finding some best answer out of a database of possible answers. You have comprehension on a conceptual level. I think that "comprehension on a conceptual level" is the exact same thing as "finding some best answer out of a database of possible answers". It's complicated, but so would a Chinese room, if it were to be good at its job.

It doesn't take many hours of meditation to realize, at least on an intellectual level, that the "I" is not in control of anything. I've been meditating for 2 years now, and at some point a flip happened. Previously, I thought consciousness was something that is containted in "I". Nowadays, it's the other way around - "I" is contained in consciousness. I'm pretty sure consciousness is an emergent property of causal interactions between matter. Approaching this from a materialist perspective is futile, it's like trying to see your own face without a mirror. The Buddhists seem to have a better idea, although they warn against this kind of mental and theoretical elaboration, since it can be a cause of needless suffering.

>>2352 do you think this also explains why psychopaths have a higher iq on average? their lack of empathy and inner thought allows them to approach situations more logically and methodically,.

>>2372 >The brain is just particles which follow the laws of physics. At that level, it's no different from a rock There is another way to interpret this assumption: if the brain is no different than a rock (in terms of its dependence on physical causality) then there's no real reason to assume that rocks do not express their own form of consciousness. Where is the line between subject and agent? Is the rock subjected to erosion, or is it reacting to the wind as a stimulus? When you drop something into a pond, are the ripples just echoes dissolving into entropy, or do they constitute an encoding of the system's intrinsic memory of the past? Our conscious minds can be viewed as the consequence of the deterministic unfolding of the material universe, or the material universe could be viewed as a projection of the mind's concepts onto undifferentiated phenomena. The relationship between these two interpretations is difficult to explain; they are kind of contradictory, but it's not a matter of one being right and the other wrong. They are essentially complements of eachother. Matter cannot exist without consciousness to conceive of it, but consciousness cannot exist without matter to emerge from. >>2420 >"I" is contained in consciousness This is a nice way of putting it.

>>2420 Buddhists would presumably understand that consciousness precedes manifestation.

>>3614 Don't forget Germans

https://youtu.be/k_P7Y0-wgos I just watched this documentary about a man who has a form of amnesia in which he cannot form any new memories - his memory "reboots" around every 7 seconds >It’s been like death. I’ve never seen a human being before, never had a dream or a thought. Brain has been totally inactive. Day and night the same. No thoughts at all. Although he says he has no thoughts at all, he can still speak - where do the words come from? He is also able to play the piano, as before the amnesia he was a renowned musician / musicologist. He does not know what he is playing, or why, or how, but he can still do it. So, can the human body go about it's daily life without consciousness? He's living, and he is able to make himself coffee and food, however he can't go anywhere without supervision because he'll forget where he's going, can't watch anything or hold a conversation because he forgets what happened 7 seconds ago, etc. Overall the doc raises more questions than answers regarding consciousness. But it's fascinating to witness an unconscious man. Pic related is his journal.

>>3620 >So, can the human body go about it's daily life without consciousness? I don't see why not. We're meat machines; Consciousness is a flawed abstraction in our programming that we use to describe and reflect on the state of our brains. It makes sense that without the ability to form memories, the idea that you are having subjective experiences would also go away, because that idea is just a way of describing memories.

Consciousness * ego = the answer depends on ego. Other than that, the real true parasite is the subconscious. It's the most powerful, even if you catch a glimpse of something, it's sometimes stored strongly in the mind. I sometimes look at a web page for a split second and after a while I'd say a certain name and it turns out that the name was the author from a forum post and I don't even recall reading that name. This is why some of the old TV shows/ads/cartoons do flash a certain frame with the information they like to implant in the minds of viewers like the controversial National Anthem sign-off had a real-estate ad, and creepily tells people to consume/obey for some reason on every outro of each subtitle. I think it's still on yt or probably in the archives. You'll have to slow down the video to see it. Now imagine how much subliminals/subconscious parasites you've seen from just watching the new capesoykaf.

>>3628 The subconscious is not a parasite. It is by far your greatest tool if you know how to wield it. Robert Waggoner's book "Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self" reveals how, with lucid dreaming, one can actually communicate with one's own subconscious directly. The technique is that when you're in a lucid dream, talk to the dream itself as if the dream was a person. You can give commands like "Hey dream, show me something interesting" and your subconscious, knowing you well, will show you something interesting. Of course, the uses go beyond mere trivial entertainment. A programmer said that he would ask for the solutions to his programming problems by talking to his subconscious using Waggoner's technique and he claimed that the results were effective 99% of the time. Here's a talk he gives on his discoveries. https://youtu.be/XVRbP9EI7L0

Consciousness is the prime abstraction, the phenomenon of self-understanding of what's too complex to self-comprehend; as such, perfect consciousness is not perfect self-awareness---the antithesis of consciousness---but..