That's conflating consciousness with free will. I didn't see anyone in this discussion make the claim that consciousness necessarily implies free will. These are conceptually separate phenomena. It is at that point that the claim "consciousness is an illusion" requires further explanation to avoid the trap of circular reasoning.
Consciousness is not an illusion, it is a real phenomenon that is experienced daily by almost every human. You might be referring to free will and its subjective experience, which is a different story.
It's just like the related "Free will is an illusion".
With "illusion" just referring to something that appears to be one thing, when it is in fact something else.
In the case of free will - we all feel as if we have it, that our future actions are under "our" control, but if we assume or brains and muscles are subject to the laws of physics then this can't be correct. We're just a meat machine. We can watch the decision making in progress and easily believe that some mysterious actor "me" is the one doing it, but in reality the meat machine is doing everything, including the self-observation, and the sense of self is just as illusory/misleading as the sense of free will.
Consciousness, rather closely connected to sense of self, can be described as illusory since it makes us feel that "being" or "experiencing" are something fundamental, some aspect of being "alive" that is distinct from the computational machinery of our brain that is otherwise doing all the perception, cognition, emoting, etc. But, again, the meat machine argument tells us this must be wrong, so it's reasonable to call consciousness an illusion - not what it seems to be, even if there is some real self-observational computation behind it ... it does exist, but it's not magic.
A useful thought experiment for anyone who believes that a sufficiently brain-like machine wouldn't experience qualia - e.g. the feeling of seeing something - is to try to pinpoint exactly what aspect of the feeling the machine would be missing? The expansive sense of color/vision as a spatial quality perhaps? The grass-like freshness of new leaves on a tree blowing in the breeze, perhaps? ...
I'm not sure what you mean by whether consciousness "really exists". Clearly you have a subjective experience... How is that not consciousness?
Or are you saying that consciousness is an emergent property of matter arranged in certain ways (i.e. your brain) and has no existence separate from that?
Completely agree free will is a separate argument, and that it doesn't exist.
This is my take. Consciousness is overrated and probably just an emergent phenomena of the brain processing external stimuli into memory, moving memories around, etc etc, in a continuous and never ending flow. Free will is just an illusion of our deterministic but fundamentally random reality.
There isn’t even an agreed upon definition for what consciousness is from a scientific perspective.
It's conflating conscious awareness with the existence or non-existence of free will. It's conscious awareness that is the ineffable mystery, unless you believe the chair you're sitting on actually feels you sitting on it. I mean, it has to if you believe the mind is nothing but atoms, because the chair is also nothing but atoms. There isn't such a thing as emergent properties, or neurons, those are just models we use to understand bunches of atoms.
There's no definition of consciousness that is 1) not subjective (= is scientific) 2) matches our intuitive understanding of consciousness 3) doesn't contain logical inconsistencies or circular reasoning.
And there are good argumnts suggesting that there'll never be such definition (summary: consciousness is inherently subjective).
The statement "consciousness is an illusion" has always struck me as a contradiction, since the nature of illusion is that there's something perceiving it.
I find the illusion explanation for complex phenomena unhelpful.
At best, this is doing nothing to actually explain - it has no value. 'Well yes, consciousness is difficult to understand because of an error in our reasoning' . It's almost circular reasoning ... you're explaining mental phenomena with mental phenomena.
Consciousness, at least to each of us individually, is demonstrably real.
Consciousness is a perception and perceptions are not illusions, even if we misunderstand what we are perceiving.
If I send you a message that says "I am not sending you a message", we can argue about what it means, but not that you got a message from me, no matter how much you trust (Edit: Or distrust) what I say to you.
Even if you don't believe you have consciousness, if you perceive you disbelieve in consciousness, then too bad: you have it.
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In contrast, free will is a completely different and easily explained kind of phenomena.
Questions and opinions about free will predate any discovery of evidence for such a thing. (There is no evidence yet!) That is a critical clue.
Free will is just a typical case of motivated reasoning. We believe some things without any rational support because they make us feel better about ourselves, the universe, allow us to focus on more practical matters. Not because they are true, or even a valid concept.
But understanding that free will is a product of motivated reasoning suggests that explaining free will is just evidence-free motivated reasoning will not settle the issue. Because people will continue to be motivated to want it to be true, they will find it hard to simply label it as self-serving, often-useful irrationality and move on.
Oh, I am not arguing with that. I'm just saying that the fact consciousness itself cannot be defined scientifically at this point doesn't mean you can just wave it away as "an illusion" without further explanation.
The brain computes an abstraction of the reality (or most likely multiple competing abstractions) and decides on actions. There's the free will.
There is some kind of idea that the consciousness "floats" on top of this abstract soup as some kind of a running program in an operative system, and is making the calls, but this is most likely not how it works.
All these abstractions of sensory input, probabilities, decisions, etc, is probably what creates the consciousnesses but I doubt that there is a meaningful boundary.
After-the-fact rationalization may be true or not - it's obvious that events can't be processed in no time at all, and that there must be some processing time for the experienced "now."
But trying to build some meaningful philosophical arguments from it is probably a red herring.
After all, when trying to explain the reasons behind a decision made without explicit reasoning and external lists of pros and cons, it's often clear that there are many "hunches" that are not easy to summarize or valuate.
The whole thing is hopelessly bogged down in linguistic vaguery to the point of making the key questions quite meaningless.
What is 'consciousness'?
Is it "the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings" as the first hit on Google suggests? If so, can we then define 'awake', 'aware', or even 'one' without circular reasoning?
Why isn't it acceptable to define consciousness as the operating instructions of the mind?
This quickly leads to another linguistic quagmire called 'free will'. If we agree that everything in our heads is governed by the laws of nature, we can agree that there are one of two possible reasons for any 'decision' we make: it was facilitated by a direct cause or it was random. There can be no other actor.
Assuming a direct cause following our operating instructions, does this mean that there is no free will? To answer that we have to open up the word 'choice'.
Choice: "an act of selecting or making a decision when faced with two or more possibilities."
We loop around to the beginning.
You define 'decide' or 'choose' any way you want to. Tell me free will is real or fake. I don't care. All I know it there are no external actors in my head and things are either 100% predictable or random. Everything else here is a very roundabout argument about the way we use English. Boring.
The assumption that conscious awareness is necessary for an exertion of free will is also a mistake. The original conclusion was chock full of assumptions. No one debated the specifics of the observed data, what is debatable is the meaning of that data.
I think you are simplifying the concept of consciousness a bit too much and are too hard in the paint for a very un-nuanced interpretation of behavioralism.
Your position would be better described as consciousness is an illusion or consciousness does not exist. It has compelling elements but I find it a hard sell.
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