Could someone try to explain to me, please, why you feel this way? How you came to feel this way?
Feel probably isn’t the right word here. I’m sure we all feel the same kind of irreducible subjective thread of consciousness that you do. Just like we all have the same illusions of free will and objective morality. But on careful reflection, taking into account all the science you know, and performing a few relevant thought experiments, it gradually becomes clear that these folk concepts just don’t make sense. The species-typical intuitions don’t go away; you just learn to stop trusting them.
Free will and objective morality are claims about how the universe works, objectively. On reflection it becomes clear that they are contradictory and false, respectively.
But the subjective thread of consciousness isn’t a fact about the universe. It’s a fact about my experience. It makes no sense to say, as you seem to be suggesting, “I may feel conscious, but really it’s an illusion”. Because if I deny it, then the whole concept of feeling is undefined, and consequently, the concept of illusion is undefined. The idea of illusions, after all, implies that we might instead experience or believe something else which is not an illusion but is true.
You can’t claim that subjective thread consciousness is “wrong” because it’s not an objective, empirical claim. We can imagine experiencing counterfactuals, but what would it be like not to have experiences? It’s not a meaningful question, so there’s no answer.
What I was asking is how, due to objective, physical events (you had ideas, read books...) you came to adopt this belief—although I don’t quite understand the belief yet, either.
Just look at all this “reality” business as a framework for understanding experience: how do you know that “reality” is “out there”? Why do you believe such claims? You are not entitled to your subjective experience, no more than to believing that Venus the planet is a goddess of love and beauty.
Feel probably isn’t the right word here. I’m sure we all feel the same kind of irreducible subjective thread of consciousness that you do. Just like we all have the same illusions of free will and objective morality. But on careful reflection, taking into account all the science you know, and performing a few relevant thought experiments, it gradually becomes clear that these folk concepts just don’t make sense. The species-typical intuitions don’t go away; you just learn to stop trusting them.
Free will and objective morality are claims about how the universe works, objectively. On reflection it becomes clear that they are contradictory and false, respectively.
But the subjective thread of consciousness isn’t a fact about the universe. It’s a fact about my experience. It makes no sense to say, as you seem to be suggesting, “I may feel conscious, but really it’s an illusion”. Because if I deny it, then the whole concept of feeling is undefined, and consequently, the concept of illusion is undefined. The idea of illusions, after all, implies that we might instead experience or believe something else which is not an illusion but is true.
You can’t claim that subjective thread consciousness is “wrong” because it’s not an objective, empirical claim. We can imagine experiencing counterfactuals, but what would it be like not to have experiences? It’s not a meaningful question, so there’s no answer.
What I was asking is how, due to objective, physical events (you had ideas, read books...) you came to adopt this belief—although I don’t quite understand the belief yet, either.
Just look at all this “reality” business as a framework for understanding experience: how do you know that “reality” is “out there”? Why do you believe such claims? You are not entitled to your subjective experience, no more than to believing that Venus the planet is a goddess of love and beauty.