A nobel prize if you could prove it, which you cannot currently.
Literally the biggest, hairiest problem in computation right now. Only thing keeping us from blowing the lid off AGI is not knowing or even remotely understanding what consciousness is.
One of my favorite quotes about this subject:
“Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.”
-Julian Jaynes
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
I think another good analogie is the human eye. Only the center has high resolution, everything around it is rather shitty, but you never realize that, because the stuff you focus on is always in the center.
Try to look at your self into your eyes the mirror while you are not looking at yourself :)
Our brain is literally nothing but electrical impulses.
We don’t know what specific arrangement of impulses, but we know 100% that it’s electrical impulses.
Again, it has been yet to be proved.
If it seems so obvious to you, please go on and prove it. You’ll die a nobel laureate rather than an armchair dbag.
What proof do you want? We can explain everything in the brain. We know how neurons work, we know how they interact. We even know, where specific parts of “you” are in your brain.
The only thing missing is the exact map. What you are lacking is the concept of emergence. Seriously, look it up. Extremely simple rules can explain extremely sophisticated behavior.
Your stance is somewhere between “thunder go boom! Must be scary man in sky!” And “magnets! Can’t explain how they work!”.
What are you smoking? It’s been proved, inasmuch as “it’s daytime when the sun is out” has been proved.
Our brain is made up of neurons firing electrical impulses.
Consciousness is in the brain.
Therefore, somewhere in those electrical impulses is consciousness.
Strange you get so defensive. Maybe it’s because your psyche can’t handle the fact that there’s nothing after death, and you need to cling to whatever faint hope you have that there might be such thing as a soul?
