Thread: Age and Lucidity

Originally Posted by lenscaper

Really?

Debatable, right?

Here is an interesting take on that from a cognitive neuroscientist. It's a little heady and kind of long....

https://aeon.co/videos/its-impossibl...neuroscientist

Just listened to the whole thing. Quite thought provoking!

If I understand it correctly, he's saying that as a conscious entities we don't experience the true nature of reality because the only thing each of us experiences is our own consciousness. And the consciousness we each experience is actually just our highest-level consciousness. We (meaning each of our highest-level consciousnesses) don't directly experience the lower-level consciousness of agents within our own minds. For example, maybe what we call our subconscious consists of one or more lower-level agents that are themselves conscious and that contribute to our high-level consciousness. What he's saying, which I think is true, is that I (meaning the highest-level of consciousness produced by my mind) normally never experience what my lower-level agents experience. That is, I don't know what it's like to be them. Similarly, they don't know what it's like to be me.

At best maybe I can sometimes get a hint of what these lower-level agents experience, based on things they do to me. For example, I think my subconscious has a lot of control over my dreams. It tries to alter my dreams in ways it considers to be good and tries to prevent me from dreaming things it considers to be bad. So by looking at my dreams I can learn something about its personality. Sometimes it behaves in a very practical manner. For example, if I really have to pee while having a dream, it does what it can to prevent me from wetting the bed by preventing me from finding a suitable place to pee in the dream. That happens to me a lot in dreams.

What he's also saying is that we can't directly experience the consciousness of other conscious entities outside of ourselves. If I see you smile I may infer that you're happy about something. But I don't really know for sure what you're actually feeling. I can never know what it's really like to be you. At least I don't know of any method that would allow me to directly experience what you're experiencing. But what other entities are experiencing is a huge part of reality. What he's saying is that we're cut off from that reality.

Anyway, that's my interpretation of what he's saying. What's your interpretation?

BTW, that aeon.co website looks like it has a lot of really great stuff on it.

Originally Posted by Zthread

What's your interpretation?

I need to watch it again to really wrap my head around what he is postulating. What I have taken away from it so far is that the only thing that is truly real is our consciousness. All of the things that we experience around us are really icons for something much, much deeper.....and our bodies are pretty much user interfaces that allow us to use these icons around us to access the reality of our consciousness. Something along those lines.

That resonates with me on a number of levels, including dreaming. If it's true that our consciousness is what is real then when we carry conscious thought with us from the waking world to the dream we are basically extending our "real lives" into the dream, thereby adding all that sleep time to our "conscious existence". That may, however fly in the face of true lucid dreaming where we want to see the dream as "not real" so that we can change it as we wish.

Hmmmmm.......I see it the other way around. If consciousness truly is reality and we can develop the ability to carry that consciousness between the dream and the waking world, then both of those worlds are the same. That begs the question for LDers......are they both real or are they both a dream?

Toward the end he alluded to the possibility of sharing consciousness....combining that shared consciousness into one. I need to revisit that to see if I got that right. That would open some very cool possibilities for the continued evolution of a collective human consciousness.

Originally Posted by lenscaper

I need to watch it again to really wrap my head around what he is postulating. What I have taken away from it so far is that the only thing that is truly real is our consciousness. All of the things that we experience around us are really icons for something much, much deeper.....and our bodies are pretty much user interfaces that allow us to use these icons around us to access the reality of our consciousness. Something along those lines.

Yes, the stuff about our bodies and sense perception being analogous to user interfaces that let us control a computer without us knowing anything about what's really going on in the computer (e.g., voltage levels in different parts of the circuitry, etc.). But is he really saying that the only thing that's real is consciousness? Maybe. I'm listening to it again right now. At one point he says "...the probability that we see reality as it is is zero." And that's based on the assumption that our senses were based on evolution (i.e., natural selection, random mutations, survival of the fittest, etc.). So he's not saying there isn't some physical reality out there, just that we don't really see it as it is. Instead, we just sense what we need to about it in order to have a reasonably high probability of surviving long enough to reproduce. The idea of survival implies some kind of physical reality, though, doesn't it? Or maybe in a reality that's purely non-physical (i.e., that consists only of consciousness) there could still be entities that survive and entities that don't survive?

He also says, "...the problem is that the very language of space and time and physical objects is the wrong language to describe objective reality. You could not frame a true description of the world in that language." So he's not saying there is no objective reality, just that we can't really know anything about what it actually is. Seems similar to Kant's doctrine of transcendental idealism, which says that we can know how things appear to us, but can never know anything about things in themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_idealism

He also says at one point that our senses provide us with a way of controlling reality without knowing anything about it.

He goes on to say, "So now the question that you asked is 'What is that reality?' And the right answer is 'I don't know.' " So he doesn't seem to be saying there's no such thing as physical reality. Instead he's saying that we just don't know what reality is. Maybe even various concepts about reality such as the idea that it's purely based on physical entities out of which consciousness somehow arises, or the idea that reality consists only of consciousness are all without meaning, according to his view. Because if he's correct in saying that we don't know anything at all about the true nature of reality, then how can we have any valid concepts relating to it?

He then goes on to talk about the "hard problem of consciousness":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_p..._consciousness

He says, "And I'm trying to think of a theory of reality that will allow me to solve the hard problem of consciousness. The problem is this: We have a lot of interesting data that gives us correlations about certain kinds of brain activity and certain conscious experiences that we have."

But what I don't understand is: If we're fundamentally incapable of knowing anything about reality, how can we hope to develop a theory of reality? It seems totally futile. He even talks about data that he seems to be implying tells us something about reality, while simultaneously denying that we can know anything about reality. Collecting and utilizing data on brain activity, for example, seems to assume we know something about the reality of brains. How could that make sense, given his view that we can't know anything at all about reality?

Anyway, to continue. He says at some point, "And so this theory of evolution that I mentioned that says we don't see reality as it is has a really strange consequence. It means that when I see a physical object like an apple, effectively I'm creating that apple as a data structure in my interface much like if I'm in a virtual reality and I have a headset on and every time I turn over here I will see something--I'm rendering that in real time--I see an apple. As I go over here, I'm no longer rendering, uh, the apple's gone, but as soon as I return over there, I will again create a three-dimensional apple. So I'm saying this doesn't just happen in virtual reality, it happens in everyday life. I look over here, I see an apple, I'm literally creating that data structure, because now I'm..., effectively the apple is a description of fitness payoffs and how to get them. It's all about fitness, that's the key thing, evolution is all about fitness. But that means that the objects don't exist as pre-existing things. When I see an apple, we like to think well that's because there really is an apple, and I'm saying, no no, there's some other reality out there, but just like the blue icon on your desktop doesn't resemble the true file, the apple doesn't resemble anything in objective reality. It's an abstract data structure that's just telling you how to act to get fitness payoffs. Here's the kicker: When you look inside your brain...inside your skull and you see a brain, that's also just a data structure that you're creating. Neurons are just data structures. They don't exist, and this is the weird stuff, I don't have a brain when no one looks, and some of my colleagues would say, 'Yeah, I agree with that. Ha ha! You don't have a brain!' But the point of this is that we create any physical object that we see in the moment that we see it, and so neurons don't exist when they're not perceived, therefore neurons could not be the source of our conscious experiences."

I think he's getting things mixed up there. How can he know whether apples or neurons really exist, if he can't know anything about reality? He could say that sometimes we create the data structure of an apple or the data structure of a neuron, depending on the situation, but that doesn't say anything about whether those things in themselves (i.e., actual apples or actual neurons) exist or not in reality. I think he's mixing up our perception of reality with reality itself. That is, he's mixing up epistemology with metaphysics. But maybe I'm misunderstanding what he's saying.

He goes on to say, "So, what is reality? It's a long answer to your question, but the answer is I don't know, but I'm trying to come up with a reality that would allow me to solve this hard problem of consciousness. So if the brain is just a symbol that we create when we look, and I'm trying to understand how consciousness is related to it, if I start with a theory in which consciousness is fundamental, and I have to do it scientifically, saying what do I mean precisely by consciousness, with mathematical precision, and I have this theory of, that I call, conscious agents, in which conscious agents interact. It's like a... The proposal is that reality is a vast social network. It's like a Twitter-verse or Facebook, so it's a big social network of conscious agents, that's the reality. They're not in space and time. They're just consciousnesses interacting with each other. As they interact, they are passing experiences back and forth. And it's an infinite Twitter-verse, an infinite set of consciousnesses out there in this big social universe, yeah, social-network universe, and any single conscious agent in that network would be overwhelmed trying to understand all of it. Like if you were trying to understand Twitter, there's tens of millions, hundreds of millions, of users, billions of Tweets. How are you going to try to understand what's going on in the Twitter-verse. Well, you can't. But what you can do is you can use visualization tools. Suppose I have a visualization tool that compresses it all down, shows you what's trending in this city and what's trending over there. So you compress it all down, maybe into something you can see through a headset... That's what evolution did for us. The reality is this big vast social network of interacting conscious agents. Each individual agent would be overwhelmed, because it's infinite--social network. And, so, what we call the physical world just is our visualization tool. That's what we have."

OK, so that's interesting. It's obvious to me that many conscious agents exist and that they interact with each other. I have to agree with him on that. But, given that he doesn't believe we can ever know anything at all about reality, how could he, or anyone else, ever find evidence of any kind for or against his theory that reality is an infinite network of interacting conscious agents? In fact, how could any science of any kind be possible, if it's fundamentally impossible to know anything about the nature of reality? Also, how could his theory help to solve the hard problem of consciousness? Maybe he gets into that later in the video.

He also talks about how we don't directly perceive anything about anyone else's consciousness. For example, if we look at someone's face, we learn very little about their consciousness. We may get some idea of their emotional state, but that's about it. I think that's a valid point. We only directly experience our own consciousness.

Then he goes on to say that we mistakenly conclude from the fact that we can't directly experience other consciousnesses to mean that reality is fundamentally unconscious. Not sure that's a common mistake. Most people don't deny that consciousness exists, do they? There are different theories about what consciousness is and where it comes from, but I think most people understand that it exists. At least, one's own consciousness must exist, because we experience it directly. Another question, though, is does reality include entities that are unconscious, or does everything have some degree of consciousness. I get the feeling that he thinks everything has some degree of consciousness, but I'm not sure.

Listening to more of it, I do think he thinks consciousness is probably fundamental. Meaning that the physical realm, to the extent that it exists, comes out of consciousness. So that is more or less what you were saying in the quote from you at the top of this post. That is, the only thing that is real, or at least that we can really know is real, is consciousness. I thing that's what he believes is probably true, although ultimately he says we can't really know anything about what's real.

He says, "I don't know what the truth is. I'm just a scientist. I'm just proposing a bold hypothesis that consciousness is fundamental and it's real. Now if it's false, it's false, we'll find out...."

But how could we ever find out, if his assertion is true that we can't ever know anything about the true nature of reality? That's the main thing that bothers me. Seems like there's a contradiction there, but it could be I'm just not understanding what he's saying.

Originally Posted by lenscaper

That resonates with me on a number of levels, including dreaming. If it's true that our consciousness is what is real then when we carry conscious thought with us from the waking world to the dream we are basically extending our "real lives" into the dream, thereby adding all that sleep time to our "conscious existence".

Good point! Wonder what he would say about that.

That may, however fly in the face of true lucid dreaming where we want to see the dream as "not real" so that we can change it as we wish.

True. I would assume that most people who are into LDs believe the physical world is real.

Hmmmmm.......I see it the other way around. If consciousness truly is reality and we can develop the ability to carry that consciousness between the dream and the waking world, then both of those worlds are the same. That begs the question for LDers......are they both real or are they both a dream?

Great question! Really would like to know what he'd say about that. He talks about our sense perceptions, and so forth, as being analogous to a user interface on a computer, but, instead, it's a user interface that lets us interact with reality in a way that promotes our survival from an evolutionary standpoint. But is it just as much a user interface to reality when we're dreaming as it is when we're awake?!

Toward the end he alluded to the possibility of sharing consciousness....combining that shared consciousness into one. I need to revisit that to see if I got that right. That would open some very cool possibilities for the continued evolution of a collective human consciousness.

Yes, that would be worth exploring! No idea at all how it would be explored, however. Another question that comes to mind in that regard is, if his theory is correct that reality fundamentally consists of interactions between an infinite number of conscious entities, then why doesn't the interface to reality that evolution has given us provide us with any direct experience of the consciousness of conscious entities other than ourselves? Instead, it just appears to give us information about a purely physical, non-conscious (and perhaps completely illusory) "reality." We seem to be almost completely cut off from what others are experiencing as conscious beings. All we can do is get a very imprecise idea of what they're experiencing, based on what they say, what facial expressions they make, etc.

Originally Posted by Zthread

Is he really saying that the only thing that's real is consciousness? Maybe.

i think that is what he is saying.....or at least strongly alluding to I love how he carries on with that kind of mischievous smile as he drops all of this very provocative stuff on us. And, yes.....he readily admits that he could be wrong, even as he says that much of this has been proven mathematically.

He goes on to say, "So now the question that you asked is 'What is that reality?' And the right answer is 'I don't know.' " So he doesn't seem to be saying there's no such thing as physical reality. Instead he's saying that we just don't know what reality is.

Originally Posted by lenscaper

i think that is what he is saying.....or at least strongly alluding to I love how he carries on with that kind of mischievous smile as he drops all of this very provocative stuff on us.

Yes, definitely thought provoking stuff! Really fun to think about.

Originally Posted by lenscaper

And, yes.....he readily admits that he could be wrong, even as he says that much of this has been proven mathematically.

Right, he did say those things. If it's mathematically correct, how could it be wrong? I think it's because a theory can be mathematically self-consistent but still not be an accurate description of reality.