CallidusAsinus

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Additionally, I feel it's uncontroversial (from a materialist perspective) to claim that human consciousness can be built. Humans do it constantly through reproduction.

Comment · 4 years ago

Yours is a very reasonable question. First of all, merging consciousness is admittedly a bit woo-woo; however, I feel it's worth considering.

According to the literature, when the corpus callosum is severed, it appears that the verbal part of the patient loses conscious access to parts of their body. However, those lost parts continue functioning independently, and are able to communicate non-verbally.

Put another way, it seems plausible that a conscious system is split into two conscious systems. This could imply the corpus callosum is involved in unifying conscious systems.

Comment · 4 years ago

Agreed. "I think therefore I am" is still foundational, last I heard.

Comment · 4 years ago

Precisely. There seems to be much debate about consciousness and what it is, but much of it is often unhelpful.

Comment · 4 years ago

In my experience, when reading about consciousness there are a couple types of claims you should be cautious of:

1) Claims that the causes of consciousness can be easily explained. As far as I can tell, they can't. Usually these explanations use the word "emergent" a lot, and tend to be linguistically impenetrable. Often more poetic than scientific when scrutinized closely.

2) Claims that consciousness doesn't exist. These arguments often feel like semantic nitpicking, and employ the word "illusion" as though it's somehow useful for explaining why you experience.

My pet criteria for whether a statement about consciousness is useful is: "Can this possibly help explain how I can merge consciousness with someone (or something) else?" To me, this feels like a tangible measurement for how materially useful a claim about consciousness might be. An example is literature on "Split-Brain" patients (such as https://www.nature.com/articles/483260a).

edit: Another category to be wary of is:

3) Claims that we cannot understand consciousness. Usually these boil down to "how can consciousness understand itself?". Poetic and poignant, but not particularly useful or scientifically grounded.