In addition to being a great post overall, the first ~half of the post is a really excellent and compact summary of huge and complicated interlocking ideas. So, thanks for writing that, it’s very useful to be able to see how all the ideas fit together at a glance, even if one already has a pretty good grasp of the ideas individually.
I’ve formed a tentative hypothesis that some human beings experience their own subjective consciousness much more strongly than others. An even more tentative explanation for why this might happen is that perhaps the brain regions responsible for reflective self awareness leading to that particular Strange Loop become activated or used intensely in some people to a greater degree and at an earlier age. Perhaps thinking a lot about “souls” at a young age causes you to strongly anchor every aspect of your awareness to a central observer-concept, including awareness of that observer-concept.
I don’t know.
Anyway, this subpopulation of highly self-conscious people might feel strongly that their own qualia are, in fact, ontologically fundamental, and all their other sense data are illusionary. (I say “other” sense data because fundamentally your prefrontal cortex has no idea which objects of its input stream represent what we would naively classify as processed “sense data” versus which objects consist of fabrication and abstraction from other parts of the brain.)
The rest of the human population would be less likely to make statements about their subjective experience of their own awareness because that experience is less immediate for them.
I developed this hypothesis upon realizing that some people immediately know what you mean when you start talking about reflective self-awareness, and for these people the idea of an observer-spirit consciousness seems like a natural and descriptive explanation of their awarness. But then there are other people who look at you blankly when you make statements about your sense of yourself as a floating observer, no matter how you try to explain it, as if they really never reflected on their own awareness.
For myself, I think of “redness” as belonging to the same ontological class as an object in a C++ program—possessing both a physical reality in bits on a chip, and also complex representational properties within the symbolic system of C++. And I see no reason why my C++ program couldn’t ultimately form a “awareness” object which then becomes aware of itself. And that could explain sentences the C++ program outputs about having an insistent sense of its own awareness. It actually sticks in my craw to say this. I, personally, have always had a strong sense of my own awareness and a powerful temptation to believe that there is some granular soul within me. I am not entirely satisfied with how this soul is treated by a reductionistic approach, but nor can I formulate any coherent objections, despite my best effots.
ed: Are people literally downvoting every reply that has anything good to say about the parent?
In addition to being a great post overall, the first ~half of the post is a really excellent and compact summary of huge and complicated interlocking ideas. So, thanks for writing that, it’s very useful to be able to see how all the ideas fit together at a glance, even if one already has a pretty good grasp of the ideas individually.
I’ve formed a tentative hypothesis that some human beings experience their own subjective consciousness much more strongly than others. An even more tentative explanation for why this might happen is that perhaps the brain regions responsible for reflective self awareness leading to that particular Strange Loop become activated or used intensely in some people to a greater degree and at an earlier age. Perhaps thinking a lot about “souls” at a young age causes you to strongly anchor every aspect of your awareness to a central observer-concept, including awareness of that observer-concept.
I don’t know.
Anyway, this subpopulation of highly self-conscious people might feel strongly that their own qualia are, in fact, ontologically fundamental, and all their other sense data are illusionary. (I say “other” sense data because fundamentally your prefrontal cortex has no idea which objects of its input stream represent what we would naively classify as processed “sense data” versus which objects consist of fabrication and abstraction from other parts of the brain.)
The rest of the human population would be less likely to make statements about their subjective experience of their own awareness because that experience is less immediate for them.
I developed this hypothesis upon realizing that some people immediately know what you mean when you start talking about reflective self-awareness, and for these people the idea of an observer-spirit consciousness seems like a natural and descriptive explanation of their awarness. But then there are other people who look at you blankly when you make statements about your sense of yourself as a floating observer, no matter how you try to explain it, as if they really never reflected on their own awareness.
For myself, I think of “redness” as belonging to the same ontological class as an object in a C++ program—possessing both a physical reality in bits on a chip, and also complex representational properties within the symbolic system of C++. And I see no reason why my C++ program couldn’t ultimately form a “awareness” object which then becomes aware of itself. And that could explain sentences the C++ program outputs about having an insistent sense of its own awareness. It actually sticks in my craw to say this. I, personally, have always had a strong sense of my own awareness and a powerful temptation to believe that there is some granular soul within me. I am not entirely satisfied with how this soul is treated by a reductionistic approach, but nor can I formulate any coherent objections, despite my best effots.
ed: Are people literally downvoting every reply that has anything good to say about the parent?