Iāll start by acknowledging that this isnāt my idea, credit to Sam Harris. I also donāt know if this is even controversial, but I figured this would be a better place to post than in Showerthoughts.
By consciousness, I mean the subjective experience of what it feels like to be. As philosopher Thomas Nagel put it:
āAn organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organismāsomething it is like for the organism.ā
Itās at least conceivable that things like free will, the self, or even the entire universe could be an illusion. For all we know, we could be living in a simulation and nothing might be real. Even if you donāt believe that, thereās still a greater-than-zero chance you could be wrong. However, this doesnāt apply to consciousness itself. Even if everything is just a hallucination, it remains an undeniable fact that it feels like something to hallucinate. To claim that consciousness could be an illusion is a self-contradictory statement as consciousness is where illusions appear.
Yes my point was that if there was a hypothetical being outside our universe looking in they could correctly say that our consciousness is an illusion from their subjective experience.
Itās an oversimplification because that is not the scientifically accepted definition of consciousness. It is currently undefined and seems to be an emergent property from the brain, the complex object known to us.
It feels like something to be. Thatās an undeniable fact. Even if thereās a creator outside our universe that programmed us and our consciousness it still feels like something to be from my subjective point of view. Thatās why consciousness under this definition cannot be an illusion. Youāre free to disagree with the definition of it that I laid out but then youāre talking about a different thing and thus not arguing against the point I made.
Ok, I agree it canāt be an illusion the way you define it, I donāt think that would be an unpopular opinion.
I also maintain that it cannot be defined the way you define it.
Youāre also not offering a definition you like better. This is quite widely accepted definition among the people thinking about this stuff. If I were to leave it undefined it would be impossible to argue against the point Iām making because there wouldnāt be certainty that weāre even talking about the same thing.
I couldnāt claim to have a definition as the origins of consciousness are still unknown to science and not formally defined.
However your definition is definitely not the widely accepted one. It doesnāt even offer a proper definition, all it does is push the unknowns to āwhat it is like to be that organismā.
Who defines what it is to ābeā something? What is the smallest unit of ābeingā? Are we saying that consciousness is an inherent property of organisms or could it be recreated on a computer?
Consciousness is the fact that it feels like something to be. Itās the feels like part thatās relevant here. Not the to be part. Itās the subjective quality of experience. It describes a phenomenom in the real world, doesnāt explain it. There is no evidence of consciousness in the world except for the fact that you can experience it yourself. Itās entirely subjective.
But then youāre just pushing the unknown/undefined part to āfeels likeā.
We cannot define it properly so we canāt discuss it formally or make assertions like itās the only thing in the universe that is not an illusion.
You could assert āCogito, ergo sum.ā but thatās kind of been done before.