Giving Up on Consciousness as the Ghost in the Machine
Giving Up on Consciousness as the Ghost in the Machine
Consciousness as used here, refers to the private, subjective experience of being aware of our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, actions, memories (psychological contents) including the intimate experience of a unified self with the capacity to generate ...
The crazy thing to me is that this is the conclusion I came to around 30 years ago, based on evidence that was already present in research available at the time.
For me it was the natural conclusion from coming to accept a no-collapse interpretation of quantum mechanics. Before that, the ghost in the machine seemed to me like maybe it could be hiding somewhere in the spooky apparent randomness of wavefunction collapse, but if the universal wavefunction fully and deterministically describes the evolution in time of all particles everywhere, and there are no terms for "thoughts and feelings and free will" in that equation, then they are epiphenomena.
https://youtu.be/4bBxMs5mhvs 'Consciousness was invented in the 1600s'
Also, the easiest way to generate 'Consciousness' in any system is to add a feedback mechanism. A simple echo in a system or input stream, is a potential emerging 'consciousness'. It becomes aware of something 'it' did before - and then it discover the illusion of 'I', free will and personal responsibility (vs long-chained cause&effect from society/environment).
She does a good job explaining how mind-body dualism is a fundamentally flawed idea. And very much agree that consciousness is basically a result of feedback mechanism. More specifically, I'd say that it's a result of the mind creating a model of itself for the purposes of metacognition that facilitates self modulation. We need to model ourselves to be able to reason about ourselves, do introspection of our actions, and to be able to adjust our behaviors.
This looks more like bad philosophy than good science.
do elaborate
Well reading it I'm not seeing any real studies or math or anything, just back and forth with people saying "Well it looks like we can't find a soul anywhere, therefore without any real evidence consciousness is just an illusion and we as people don't really exist, just sort of... believing we do because of brain juices."
Which is the laughable position of eliminativism. Admittedly I didn't read the whole thing, but I'm seeing names and quotes, I'm not seeing data.