Do you not think that you are conscious? Don't you have subjective experience?

That's the point. We can't.

> If it were an illusion, then we would have to be conscious to experience the illusion.

Or, at least something other than us would need to be conscious in order to experience what it'd be like being us.

I think it's rather the opposite, they aren't wrong about their internal experience, it's just that their internal experience doesn't match the objective reality of their body (which in this sense is external).

I think it is indeed entirely possible that our self-model can fool us about the realities of various situations, even those with our own body/emotions/etc, but I'm not sure how one could then derive the conclusion that the experience doesn't exist. It would just be instead that the experience is rather inaccurate/confabulated.

Not sure if personal experiences count. Generally, we laugh at people who talk about esoteric experiences.

So a simple explanation could be that consciousness is an illusion?

Or put differently, is there any phenomenon that needs the assumption of consciousness?

The way I experience myself could be just the history of experiences. So there is something that the brain can refer to.

I cannot resist, I've done meditation with never performing the out of body experience and I've read about it in great detail. I would still think the possibility of it all being a hallucination and even if performed with thinking it was definitely real. Hallucinations can be so real that they're impossible to disprove. Consciousness might not even be real in the sense that most people think about it as because reality tends to be deterministic with the impossibility to prove otherwise.

Funny thing is you could absolutely say the same thing about every other human on the planet. There is just no way for you to confirm that I’m having a subjective experience. I might be acting like I am. And so might everyone else. The only one you can be absolutely sure of is yourself.

We all just sort of assume that other people have consciousness but it’s impossible to know for sure.

Of course you can. You know it to be true that you posses consciousness because you experience it directly. What is impossible (empirically) is knowing that about anyone or anything else.

Yes exactly, it is the thing that is most familiar to us, most accessible, and the only thing of which we can be certain. Descartes in his Meditations went down this path, starting with that foundation.

But I don't think you need to land on solipsism, because we don't have to believe only those things which can be proved. To me, it seems a reasonable hypothesis to suppose there are other consciousnesses. For an experimental line of thinking that leads to that conclusion, I would recommend the aforementioned Meditations.

Many are tempted to think that the physical world is the certain thing that we have, missing the fact that we experience the physical world, and so it is experience that we have access to, not the physical world itself. That I am conscious and have experiences of such and such is the thing I am most certain of. Whether there are physical things that correspond to those experiences is an extrapolation.

It is probably just a difference in semantics but for me, it seems like consciousness is the only thing that is assuredly not an illusion.

That I am having a subjective experience is undeniable. The objects of my consciousness all might be (and probably are) something else than they appear to be (as is often the experience with different mind altering substances).

I don't know; is there? How do I tell?

I mean, I know what I experience, but I'm not an objective observer. There's evidence that what we perceive as the continuous stream of events is actually assembled in our memory after the fact from various out-of-order sensory inputs.

How do I know that what I perceive as consciousness (and remember, I have no way of knowing whether it's the same as what anyone else perceives, or whether they perceive it at all) is anything more than just wishful thinking? And that's a serious question to which I really want an answer.

I know this post is from 18 hours ago, but I'm actually quite skeptical of this statement. My most pressing question about consciousness is actually the limited nature of the self. My consciousness does not extend fully into sleep, it does not extend in to making my heart muscle contract. It seems to elude me when i cannot remember something. It seems my consciousness is not, in fact, stable, ad varies through time.

To which I can only reply that I am not sure what I just read ...

How is that different than a soul?

> aren't aware of their own existence, so something about you makes you different from them. I

I see no discernible difference in that regard. That I string words together in a way that seems interesting isn't evidence that I'm conscious. It's evidence that there's some interesting algorithm hardwired into my brain meat. There's no magic there, no spirit, and it's embarrassing that you believe there is and that it's somehow akin to rationality for you to believe it.

Not sure there's one I can communicate to you, but I'm perfectly capable of forgetting the word for something and still knowing unambiguously yet wordlessly what it is, that's an experience.

Catching a ball? Running? Experiencing emotions from wordless music? Viewing scenery? Engaging with a computer game? How are they not conscious experiences?

It probably is but I wouldn't be so sure it is. I have neither a feeling nor a rationally logical proof of this idea. It's just an intuitive guess.

> we have the ineffable experience of being alive in this world

The experience of being, and the experience of attributes like "alive" and in "somewhere in particular" are separate things. AFAIK the latter even is attributed to specific parts of the brain scientifically and it's known these can be broken. I certainly feel like "I am" but I have no idea of whether I am alive and in which world I am the first seconds after the alarm clock rings. I feel my being and also have visual perception but judgement/semantics in what I see emerges 0.5-10 seconds later.

That's absolutely true. My wife and I sometimes joke that each of us is an incorporeal figment in the other's dream. It's impossible for me to know with certainty that I am not the only real consciousness in existence. It's an interesting line of thought, but ultimately unproductive; what could I do if it's true? If it's not, then the validity of all of the other consciousnesses is just as pressing as mine. Either way it behooves me to behave as though it is true, so I suppose that's the starting point for all of my thoughts on this topic: I and all other humans have a first person subjective experience. I agree with (parent? gp?) that describing the nature of that experience is non-trivial.

I used to believe that too, but it turns out that consciousness can interact with consciousness.

E.g. find someone you love and trust, sit facing each other, hold hands, stare into each other's eyes, and breath in synchrony. For some cases nothing really happens in other cases... shared subjective experience.

> The domain of scientific knowledge is completely cut off from subjective experience.

Shared subjective experience is still subjective.

How would a conscious entity experience an internal state in a way that's not like color (or pain, etc)? I think the claim is that conscious entities must experience some internal states somehow (otherwise what are you concious of) - how else could they do that other than via sensation?

I don't think that internal states of non conscious entities has much bearing on what a conscious entity does or is.

It's almost as if we've always known the true nature of our consciousness, we just keep overlooking it :)