/wiz/ - Wizardry

>>207231
Nice, thoughtful post. Happy to share my thoughts on it, however I readily accept that my perspective on things has already changed more than once in my life.

1. Consciousness, in and of itself, is the product of electrochemical activity over a neuron network(s). It is the product of the brain (or better put "a" brain) which, in the case of humans, is currently immeasurably large. In a physical or evolutionary sense, where it came from was the primitive amygdala as found with surprising similarity across the animal kingdom, processing the symbiotic effects of chemical processes such as adrenaline and the results on the body therein. Evolitionary strategy suggest that those born with randomly larger brains better survive the shared environment to survive, thrive and procreate such that these benefits are passed on from generation to generation. This is of some note, because we can see that as the brain gets larger, different and more acute behaviours emerge. We see that play emerges once you get to the mammalian brain of the rat, just as we see it in the utterly different evolutionary path of the octopus. Taken to absurd levels such as that of a human, we some very strange behaviours, as I'm sure we can all agree… But specifically to where consciousness actually emerges, it is likely -measured- at the point where conscious response occurs. We in the animal kingdom can all get our unconscious fight/flight brain activites that make us run away or otherwise camouflage ourselves when we hear the footsteps of a bear nearby, but such behaviour can be described in the sense of an automaton. It is with the markers of immediate stimulus that pinpoint consciousness. For me the observation of play is one of the gold standards, as is any other undeniable proof of emotion. Similarly when Elephants mourn the loss of a member of their pack.

2. In a word, "runtime". If you are thinking, then you are conscious. If you are responding to stimuli that aren't explained entirely by mere biochemical activity, then you are conscious. When I wiggle my toes, I look at them and then choose to wiggle them. I feel those sensations. I feel the lactic acid build up rapidly. Even though these activities are base, it is the fact that I am aware of them and, in effect, am accessing my memory in order to digest what it is I have experienced provides the example of my consciousness. To define this consciousness, it is the real-time continuity between some event and another, preferably with retrospection, that describes this 'conscious state'. Crucially, this reinforces the concepts of unconscious and the more difficult semi-conscious, because of their necessary lacking in one or more facets of the human runtime experience. Why it is with us can be conveniently but unsatisfactory explained by evolutionary advantage, but it still doesn't sit right with me up to present day. It feels as though there are too many complexities that would mathematically require too many variations over too long a time span to account for the vast evolution of the brain unless some quite ridiculous eugenics was at play for many tens of millions of years. But that is a different topic altogether.

When it comes to AI, as people are talking about a lot recently, where the simulacrum comes into play and the divide between the genuine and imitation, I don't think we fully have the vocabulary yet to satisfy an answer. But it's very interesting.

I have many, many thoughts on this topic, such that I don't think I could convey them well.

So i'll sum them up as follows: Consciousness is many things. Yes, it is the biggest (and only) mystery of existence, besides the mystery of why anything exists at all, but that may be the exact same question. Any models regarding what it is and why it exists will be reducible to whatever metaphysics you have faith in (Because no metaphysics can be "proven"). The scientific "explanation" is hardly an explanation but rather an observation. It claims that when certain structural states exist within spacetime, this results in an "emergent property" of consciousness, and that moreover certain structures correlate with certain qualitative experiences. This could be a correct empirical observation to make, perse. Though it doesn't imply much else than what is stated on the tin (Therefore offering very little real explanatory value), and that means we basically know nothing. If you spend even a little time thinking about consciousness, that is what you will realize.

Nobody knows anything about this topic. Anybody pretending to understand what consciousness is is lying to you. Yet that is what makes it so interesting. On related topics, see: Philosophical zombie thought experiment, The Hard problem of consciousness (David Chalmers), philosophical idealism, philosophical scepticism, The knowledge argument (or "mary's room), The chinese room thought experiment, the ship of Theseus thought experiment and many more I am probably forgetting.

>>207237
>Anybody pretending to understand what consciousness is is lying to you
uwotm8? THeories aren't lies. Predictions aren't lies. Perspectives on subjective issues on cutting edge topics are not lying to anyone.

>>207238
It's a figure of speech.
Let me put it in pedantic terms for you: "Anybody claiming they know the answer with certainty is wrong."

>>207240
There's no way of falsifying an unknown either. It would have to be known to 'state with certainty' that something is wrong. On the topic of consciousness, there is an almost endless list of examples of qualia that serve as concrete examples of consciousness. We know this because we are the ones describing them. Similarly with the advent of neuroscience, especially within the field of medicine, we have also defined edge cases with techniques such as 'Awake craniotomies' utilising zonal cortical mapping. There are more studies and patents than any of us could care to read in this specific domain alone. More importantly, thanks to electroencephalographic maps, we can even pinpoint where functionality within specific neuron networks is stimulated or retarded through both physical and electrical intervention, and the differences from person to person. Moreover, the entire brain of the fly has been mapped on a single neuron level (and digitised and simulated). And on top of that, they have already got AI reading brainwaves to dialogue described to an individual, and it recreates an image via those brainwaves to be described. There may be a lot more worth investigating than you are aware of in the last few months of advances alone.

>>207231
>When one is immersed in imagination, is that an extra-reality experience
It's quite appealing to think in terms of imagination outside of reality. We humans certainly appear to be within one single reality, and our imaginations are the product of simulated realities, much like a video game simulates a reality; the difference being that our imaginations appear to be unscripted (or scripted by ourselves heuristically). Dreams are strongly connected with survival strategy, and it may well be that our daydreaming is some variation upon the dreamlike state. Most likely this serves to promote environmental advantage over our competitor. But these lines become unexplained when it comes to music, art, storytelling etc. Why these exist might be that interesting people were less likely to be eating or killed when in a group, and that groups themselves were less likely to be a target of other groups, thus satisfying the concept of the group evolutionary strategy. It seems reasonable, but little more than an idea that fits. More likely is that these served as biomarkers for finding a mate. To bring this back to the topic of consciousness, we can clearly see that the degree consciousness must be directly (if loosely) proportional to intelligence. We can also identify that there is a direct correlation to the number of neurons when running comparisons. Curiously no real correlation with size, but definite correlation with gyrification (the number of folds)…

Perhaps it doesn't satisfy much of the philosophical viewpoint, but science and related technologies seem to be satisfying the vast majority of questions in the area.

Sounds like pretentious psychobabble the most mentally Ill people are the ones that work in psychology mostly femoids

They don't care about the real answer, only whatever answer allows them to chop up more babies and brains. The same arguments can be used to decide that grown-ass men are not "conscious", based on some arbitrary complexity.

There is nothing complex about conscious behavior. It is not ubiquitous, in that only certain systems manifest this thing we call "consciousness", but it exists not because of some informational complexity, but because living things, or things that resemble the cognitive processes that arose organically, could not have integrated their parts in any other way. The way we orient our behavior and do anything is what we call consciousness, and for humans it is experienced as we are familiar with. There is no other way for this system to be regulated. Either we are conscious and operate on our own authority, or another authority is presumed to manage us. Without that, the body would fall apart, and excessive managerialism leads to us becoming organic goop and shit. They don't like acknowledging that their grand plan for the human race and "bright future" involves us being turned into managed slurry, where we are born as livestock and live as cattle. It's grotesque what they have in mind for us, but it's too late to stop it now.

There is no "thing" in the physical world where consciousness can be found. It is a process which creates experience that is not fully "part of the world", in that our imagination is not happening in some other space that is equivalent to "real space". The space we observe in the world of objects, which is not limited to physical space but physical space is one example, has nothing directly to do with the "space" where consciousness would be relevant. One thing for us though is that we only ever have a model in our minds of the world, based on what we sense, and so our concepts of physical space are beholden to how we can even conceive of it. It is not that the physical space isn't "real", because obviously physical objects are relevant regardless of what we think about them. It is rather that we are only able to perceive of space in ways we are able, and this leads to so much of our stupidity and inability to grasp things that are actually pretty basic propositions like the concepts of causality and relativity.

Consciousness is not a big mystery at all. In various ways, its nature was divined long before modern science, and written of in mysteries and priestly functions. If that weren't the case, there wouldn't have been so much effort spent on changing what people think and forcing them to like their miserable existence. That would be impossible if the people who ruled actually believed consciousness was unknown or unknowable. Enough people have known things, in some way or another, and no one can be stopped from thinking about how they think. It took very perverse ideology and pedagogy to force people to believe this is an unknowable mystery, and that is very recent - as in, you couldn't promote this level of forced ignorance until the 20th century could violently impose it. The education we get now uses the same tactics that were used to psychologically destroy slaves, but in slavery the tactics were used as a punishment. Now they are the rule, to prepare us for much worse.

There is a vast world outside of consciousness and self-indulgence. People really need to get outside and find fresh air, while they can. The world is becoming a worse place, and this is the last gasp of human freedom. Enjoy it while you can.

>>207497
Before someone says "but what about computers and AI" - computers are specifically designed to not be conscious, to automate a task we do that is very simple and do it very fast. That is all the computer does. It is designed not to know at all what it is doing, specifically because "knowing" would interrupt what the machine is built to do. If we built a machine that "knows" in the sense we do, that would be conscious, it would be a very different construct architecturally, and it would be built with that in mind. We could build something like that now, but it would be a very crude project and would very clearly not be like us, and probably markedly inferior in output. But if we wanted to make Frankenstein's Monster, that was conceived long ago.

>>207231 (OP)
>Is it material or immaterial?
false dichotomy. it's both. what we call immaterial is matter too, just more subtle.

>>207497
>The way we orient our behavior and do anything is what we call consciousness
Consciousness also implies a degree of self-awareness and a subjective experience of reality. That is an inexplicable mystery. For example, we can create a robot that functions as complexly as a rat. Nobody would argue said robot is conscious. Life could exist and function in an automaton form, yet it does not.

>Either we are conscious and operate on our own authority, or another authority is presumed to manage us.
Pray tell, at what point do atoms stop following the laws of physics and start deciding for themselves what they should do? By what mechanism does this occur? Every other object in existence, we lay entirely at the feet of cause and effect. We have yet to account for the experience of "free will", whether it truly exists or not, yet it is a cornerstone of our understanding of consciousness.

>>207498
>it is designed not to know at all what it is doing, specifically because "knowing" would interrupt what the machine is built to do.
lol what? Getting AI to "know" what it is doing is literally the core of machine learning.

>>207508
We are self-aware because we possess symbolic language and sufficient linguistic comparison to contemplate "I" as something distinct from "me", pick apart sentences. We often forget how difficult it actually is for a brain to exist that can string together a sentence and make sense of it.

>Pray tell, at what point do atoms stop following the laws of physics and start deciding for themselves what they should do?
Atoms "follow the laws of physics" that we read into them. They were doing their thing, and that is what they do - physics. We study physics to study bodies and their motion that existed before we wrote down any laws.
Life does what it does on its own power because that is what life does - that is what the atoms, or anything constituting life, is built to do, to operate on its own power. That is the basic definition of what it means for something to live, and therefore, what we do. Thinking and acting on that thought is just one thing certain life, like us, does.

This entire argument rests on an infantile egotism that is broken apart the moment you fall asleep, or feel things you didn't want to feel. If consciousness were a "hard problem" you could in principle turn it off in a way short of killing yourself. It's controlled insanity to uphold this view of the mind as an absolute in this way, and it's actually very recent to think this is what the mind is. When you actually look at ancient philosophy around the world, including the Greeks, the nature of the mind was generally understood as something originating from material origins. The "divine spark" was largely a way to explain cognition's sense of ideas, since it was a step too far to believe that ideas were constructed in some emergent sense. The actual hardware of the brain didn't require this to "think", but the story of gods and so on explains what, exactly, we are seeing, since there would have had to be some "idea" to form the body and mind in the first place. And, if you see the world as basically ideas that animate otherwise inert matter, you have a very different view of what the body is. Idealism and materialism took on meanings in modernity that they didn't have in the past, and if you follow through with philosophy up until modernity, they often hold to this idea of ideas and materials. The bigger shift is that God took the place of the earlier concepts of the divine rationality, and this suggested a whole different take on the world and what was important.

The pseudointellectual "hard materialist" teenage pissant knows nothing about anything. They're not taught any context to understand that basically all of their conceits about the world are nonsense. If kids were taught any historical context of how these things were considered, and if religious education wasn't completely bastardized to teach kids to be Christofascists and nothing more, we wouldn't have this problem as much. Usually, though, a lot of us figure out something. It's just that the actual shit is either occulted or something that people figure out through formal education very late in the game. They used to teach philosophy to the more advanced kids, until that was taken away from them and they were taught to work service work slavery.

>>207509
Machine learning is still running an algorithm to "learn", record the information, and then recall it. At best, it would be algorithms writing AI code after some process, but often machine learning relies on simple paradigms, rather than anything that would constitute "learning" in the sense that new information is formed. Even if that happened, that would not be "knowing". It would be like a student solving proofs by rote using an algorithm to solve the proof without actually "knowing" why they follow the algorithm. I don't think you can understand the concept of what "know" means philosophically or what would distinguish knowledge from information processing. If information processing is the sole criteria of knowledge, then literally everything in the universe "knows", and there are a few idiots who actually try to claim this. That's not what knowledge and consciousness entails.

Basically the only reason this stupidity persists is because stupid kids are taught to run their mouth, and smart kids know not to speak and let the stupid continue being stupid.

>>207508
Also, if not our own example, where else does "sentient consciousness" exist? We can sense other people are much like ourselves, and animals possess some experience and awareness, feelings much like our own, and some thought process that is cruder. As mentioned, one difference with humans is symbolic language and faculties which, once they arose in humans, could develop rapidly once the humans start to speak crude words to each other and this ability both develops after it was long latent in the human forebears, and then passes down to offspring by selection and killing off any new humans who were too stupid to live.

1. Evolution. Emergent property.
2. wholly material, chain reaction happening inside your brain


these seem really obvious to me

Maybe it's a trap to explain human processes with current technology but I see consciousness as a sort of UI.

Nowadays we operate computers by using a visual interface that then translates our actions into a combination of 1s and 0s. I see consciousness the same way as it translates photons triggering the receptors in our eyes or whatever to create an image of say an orange. I can use this consciousness to touch and smell the orange and create this vivid image that I can work with. Consciousness is us translating simple chemical reactions into concepts.

Sry I'm not very educated and well spoken so I can't quite put it into words.

I think its a serious unsolved question. I heard two realistic solutions, panpsychism and idealism.
Panpsychism seems wrong. It says matter is conscious, but everyone also says that matter is made of atoms, meaning seperate things with gaps between them. How come atoms, separate things when organized into a molecule, organized into a neuron, organized into a brain can unite into one consciousness, wouldn't there be a huge number of tiny separate consciousnesses simultaneously?
Idealism also seems wrong, if idealism is true, the substance of the world being mental, you should be able in theory to do all kinds of telekinesis, things like prayer would work, magic might be real, you should be able to affect the mental world with your mental mind, but none of that seems to work.

>>207590
>you should be able to affect the mental world with your mental mind
>you should be able to affect the mental world with your mental mind
can you not? Sure, not like the movie Lucy but our physical actions are a manifestation of our mental processes and ideals.

>>207231
>What is consciousness precisely?
>Is it material or immaterial? When one is immersed in imagination, is that an extra-reality experience?
Here's an article I found on probabilities of different metaphysical consciousness theories being true:

https://nintil.com/consciousness-and-its-discontents

>What theories do I think are probably true, with probabilities, as of today:

>1. Neutral monism/Panpsychism(60%)
>2. Interactionist dualism(30%)
>3. Epiphenomenalism(10%)
>4. Idealism(~epsilon%)
>5. Non-interactionist dualism(~epsilon%)
>6. Identity theory(~0% as it rejects consciousness as real)
>7. Eliminativism(~0% as it rejects consciousness as real)

>>207231
>In most countries that permit abortion, the cut-off is at 24 weeks.
Meanwhile, the same countries are totally fine with cutting part of a baby's penis off with no anesthesia.

>>207589
It could be seen as a "user interface" in some sense, in that there is no other obvious way to integrate all the things a human body (or any other body) does when it is continuously active. We could view ourselves as something other than "consciousness", but that is the way in which we construct any knowledge we possess of the world. Strictly speak, "we" don't have any existence as ourselves, and "I" don't have any inherently shared consciousness with anyone else. If I did, I would be a very different entity. Shared consciousness would be some form of telepathy basically.

Consciousness or "the self" is not constrained to the body or a strictly biopolitical definition. We are what we eat, the tools we use, the communications we have with others which allow for any language. We are not intimately tied to anything external to our body in the way the body's functions are integrated. But, we can view limbs or parts of the body as external. There is no identifiable "center" of consciousness like the brain, if that's what you are thinking, that is inherently what "consciousness" is. Without any of our tools, humans would just be slightly more advanced apes. We only are what we are because we live in a society where language and tool use are ubiquitous, to the point where without that we would barely be recognizable. Said tools and language in many ways modify us during life, and affected human development compared to what we were before tool use developed to anything like the extent we practiced it in any period of civilization. That process didn't end - we are still changing, and quite profoundly, up to today.

So much of this stupidity is about defending a conceit about "humanism" that is rooted in biopolitics, which is intended to destroy concepts of political equality, spiritual universalism where all men were equal before God, and things that are hostile to a social order that emphasizes political and social inequality as much as it can. In a political or spiritual sense, humans are remarkably similar in their basic functions, and humans haven't changed significantly from what they were thousands of years ago in that regard. In abilities and how humans live, we are barely recognizable from someone 3000 or 4000 years ago. Someone in Roman times would be far more recognizable, and they noted their distinction from peoples who were barbarians or savages, yet at the same time the Romans didn't have our conceits of race or eugenics in the way we use them today, and so they recognized that barbarians and savages were not in any biological sense different creatures politically. The barbarians and savages had some concept of society that allowed them to recognize what the Romans were and understand what the Romans were, and vice versa. It was the same with the natives of the Americas - they understood very quickly what the white man was, and the white man could figure out what the natives were, despite their societies and technology being very different and having very different concepts of what the world was. It wasn't like the two couldn't understand the other and behaved like automata. That's always been an imperial conceit to justify shitty behavior, or a way to confound the white man by refusing to play by his rules.

If you got rid of that pigheaded conceit, then there is no "problem of consciousness". People from every society have asked this question for a long time and wrote and told stories about it, had some sense of how they think. This "problem" is more a conceit of institutional knowledge, which always has to defend the institution's primacy over the people.

consciousness is clearly prior to any process appearing within it, so it being produced by anything "physical" or "material" is braindead.

two dominant proposed models of consciousness among neuroscientists and AI researchers are Integrated Information Theory and Global Neuronal Workspace. there are studies being done this year to put them head to head, testing divergent theories to see which is a more probable account of conscious experience. id read up on those if youre interested in seeing where science is at with consciousness. IIT has a lot of haters because it proposes a capacity for consciousness in things we might not ordinarily consider conscious; however, i think as humans we're too pretentious about our experience and should maybe be open to possible avenues of conscious experience theories such as IIT may postulate

Conscioussness is a fundamental force in the universe. Brains just filter conscioussness.

>>207661
This is pure ideology and stupid. It's literal autism. This is something a basic insight into the question should dismiss out of hand - it's literally one of the ways to test if children are brain damaged if they actually believe that shit after counter-arguments against it are raised.

>>207667
Given the state of the Academy these days, they will prove nothing, just like other fake debate spectacles.
There isn't a real debate about this in the study of cognition. Anyone suggesting "pure idealism" is a fag, pure and simple.

There are numerous reasons why this essentialization of life/mind is taken, and it is purely political. Anyone advancing it in the past century is a piece of shit who is lying profusely to their audience, which is to say, most philosophers are this. It's so shameful that everyone gave up on philosophy. Wittgenstein cleaned up formal logic and given the idiots who came after, philosophy should just stay dead until we can be in a not-retarded world again.

>>207839
I agree. If all humans die there wont be a shred of consciousness in this part of the solar system. It's not something that exists in a vacuum or even as a collective.

“What’s reality? I don’t know. When my bird was looking at my computer monitor I thought, ‘That bird has no idea what he’s looking at.’ And yet what does the bird do? Does he panic? No, he can’t really panic, he just does the best he can. Is he able to live in a world where he’s so ignorant? Well, he doesn’t really have a choice. The bird is okay even though he doesn’t understand the world. You’re that bird looking at the monitor, and you’re thinking to yourself, ‘I can figure this out.’ Maybe you have some bird ideas. Maybe that’s the best you can do.”
― Terry A. Davis

>>207842
That's a decent quote.

We really can't comprehend something as massive as the entire world let alone the universe.

We can grasp 0,001% of it for a blink of an existence. We don't really understand what the hell is going on. Then we die within a few decades and the universe keeps on expanding and contracting.

>>207840
I consider that animals with complex enough nervous systems are conscious in a way like us - that is in line with all serious investigation into what consciousness is. Animals do many of the things we do to "think". Humans only do so with symbolic language that allows them to communicate the idea, and use tools which affect both the world and themselves. There is nothing essentially different about the thought process, some genetic seed which makes humans "special". Humans are not too clever with symbolic language, and spend most of their energy fighting each other and deciding most of humanity is retarded and illiterate, rather than things that would have been obvious if humanity were anything other than a failed race.

Consciousness implies not any machine of information processing, but a machine continuously operating in a way that would allow a persistent energy to form in an organized fashion that allows life to integrate its parts into a body. It can only do this in subjective experience - there's no "consciousness" that can be isolated in a lab in a crude way. We have a sense of what can and cannot be conscious in the way we are, that does not require an elaborate proof or behaviorism. We can tell that computers are designed specifically to not be conscious - and if you understand computer science and people who know what it really is, they'll tell you the computer is really a tool to make slaves and masters, rather than "think". That's why "slave" and "master" terminology are omnipresent in the computer field. Most of this wank is a liberal fantasy where they want to naturalize their preferred form of slavery and the eugenics horseshit that has always failed.

>>207839
>it's literally one of the ways to test if children are brain damaged if they actually believe that shit after counter-arguments against it are raised.

More info on this please

>>207661
But I can significantly alter my own consciousness by altering my physical state. When I go to sleep my consciousness completely ceases only to be restarted a few hours later. As I get more and more drunk I can quite clearly see how my consciousness is slowly eroding away, only for it to again come back full force the next day. If consciousness was purely a metaphysical phenomenon then none of these would be true.

>>207950
It is possible for a metaphysics to exist without "mind" as a necessary foundation. There's nothing purely physical about "mind" in the sense that you could find it in a lab, but to speak of a "real world" implies speaking of something material. Metaphysics isn't asking a game about our subjective experience at all, but asks about the nature of what it is for something to exist or what reality even is. A proper metaphysical view wouldn't regard that "we" have any existence whatsoever, as if our subjective experience were necessary for the universe. That was always understood to be autism and failure. It doesn't necessitate that metaphysics is just a copy of physical laws, and suggests quite the opposite, but metaphysics is not "ideas" as we would have them. It is rather us asking a question about what it would be for us to speak of being. To the world, "being" is irrelevant. Sensory experience and consciousness is something for us, and our sense of metaphysics implies that there is a world outside of us that allowed us to exist.

>>207867
Basically it's like a child actually believing something "disappears" if it is out of their sight. A child can see through this on their own, but when parents and authorities wish to damage a child, they will tell them lies and more lies, lie to their faces. The point isn't to convince the child the lie is factually true, but to convince the child that he will always be lied to about everything and that the default is that humans always lie about basic truth, so that no conversation is possible. It is one part of the Satanic cycle that dominates humanity.

>>207839
>This is pure ideology and stupid.
stop listening to pseudo-intellectual commies who just yell "ideology" at whatever they disagree with and think that instantly refutes it without having to address anything.

>it's literally one of the ways to test if children are brain damaged if they actually believe that shit after counter-arguments against it are raised.
this literally implies nothing of relevance and it's not surprising that you think it somehow does.

>>207950
>When I go to sleep my consciousness completely ceases only to be restarted a few hours later.
how do you know? for there to be an observation there has to be consciousness first. without consciousness there can be no observations of any kind, so it is literally impossible to have an observation of the absence of (one's own) consciousness. an explanation for both the phenomenon of a perceived absence of consciousness, as well as the fallacious reasoning that leads to that conclusion can be accounted for without postulating anything beyond consciousness. the illusion is created by the absence of memories. memories are also things in consciousness, and like all things in consciousness, they follow certain rules of behavior as to how they are created, modified, and destroyed. memories have nothing to do with what the actual prior states of consciousness were. they could be completely artificial, painting a fictional life story that never happened.

>I can significantly alter my own consciousness by altering my physical state.
you're subtly implying a fallacious dualism here which shows that your thinking on this regard is confused.

>As I get more and more drunk I can quite clearly see how my consciousness is slowly eroding away, only for it to again come back full force the next day.
the forms that consciousness takes may be more or less complex. as an example, let's compare a 2x2 resolution screen where each pixel can only be either white or black, with an 8K (7680x4320) screen where each pixel is 24 bit color (2**24 different colors). it is undeniable that the latter is immensely more complex than the former, if the latter's resolution were to decrease together with the colors each pixel can manifest, then you could say that it is "eroding", but the screen itself is never gone, it's only changed in complexity, which implies nothing about the screen, i.e., consciousness, ever appearing and disappearing. (also, "clearly see … it[self] eroding away" lol.)

>If consciousness was purely a metaphysical phenomenon
you're clearly using some fringe definition of metaphysical (like that of new age retards) for this sentence to make sense. "metaphysical phenomenon" is a contradiction. metaphysics is the field of philosophy that concerns itself with Being itself, and not with specific beings, i.e., the forms of Being. all phenomena are empirical and refer to the forms that Being takes. empirical phenomena could be utterly different to what they are and that would make no metaphysical difference.

to further clarify the difference between metaphysics and empirics (science) and to clear up the simple misconception that materialists have, consciousness is referring to the screen itself where one's life is played, whereas mental, physical, etc. (we may classify them however we like) states are states of consciousness. so it makes no difference how drugs and head injuries affect our thoughts and perceptions because it doesn't make any difference to the screen itself, only its states.

>>208005
>It is possible for a metaphysics to exist without "mind" as a necessary foundation.
it is, but then it is hanging it midair until you give it a foundation of something that truly exists for which all its propositions apply. it has already been done in a /b/ post some months ago. using simple sound reasoning you can prove the following; (1) becoming, which is given right now, is not something that itself becomes ("impermanence is permanent"), and so must always be; (2) multiplicity, which exists right now, is not something that can emerge from pure unity or lead to it, and so it must always be; (3) multiplicity is not something that can be itself multiple, but is "one"; (4) from 1-3, there is no first or final state of existence.

and there you have a simple metaphysics without "mind" or anything else as a foundation, and that's why it remains in midair, because it doesn't say what it is that exists and is in eternal becoming with not initial of final state. in fact, a materialist could perfectly agree with that but have in mind the states of matter, and of which consciousness is supposedly derived (and even the first two premises can't even get going because we don't have a reason to suppose that there really is "becoming and multiplicity right now").

the fundamental problem of materialism is that it can never provide a valid instance of this "matter" (in the metaphysical sense, not in the physical sense of "particles" or "tangible things") to found metaphysics. and this is why idealism is the only valid metaphysics. it is an absolutely undeniable truth that there thoughts and perceptions right now (i.e., all these sounds i hear, these colors, etc), and it is immediately observable that they are multiple and becoming (props. (1) and (2) above), so it immediately follows from the the mini metaphysical system i outlined above that thoughts and perceptions have no beginning or end, and from (4) that there is nothing else but that. so not only is it metaphysically impossible for consciousness to ever disappear or not exist, but there can't exist anything but consciousness. (in a way, consciousness doesn't really exist, at least not as a thing itself, just its thoughts and perceptions, or to use the metaphor of the screen, there is no screen, just ever-changing pixels, etc.).

>Basically it's like a child …
again, this has no metaphysical relevance. that i see my mother put away my teddy bear in a wardrobe and i later go open the wardrobe and find it right there (and if it's gone there is discoverable explanation for why, e.g., my sister took before me, etc.), is merely a process of the transformation of perceptions. object permanence is always talked about psychologically (and if so we may call it the psychological process through which a metaphysical illusion is created), but we can consider it as well as a general feature of how this one world works, as opposed to how the worlds we visit in dreams work.

>the Satanic cycle that dominates humanity.
wow, you really are retarded.

>>208136
Didn't bother reading, you out yourself as a fag by backing the Right on anything.

>>208136
That said I already saw by skimming some idiotic whopping lies from someone who literally cannot think without Mommy telling him the right ideas. God, you fuckers really are fags, natural slaves.

>>208136
All I will say is "read, nigga, read". Everything you've cited has been already refuted / discussed, and the retards can only recapitulate autistically their talking points, because they always defer to institutional authority to claim "victory" of a spurious sort.

"Becoming" is just Germanic gobbledegook by the state ideologues of the monarchy. None of that shit is real, and it was always intended to convey a POLITICAL reasoning, rather than a scientific one. Hegeloids are terrible scientists and engineers, and anyone who did anything in Germany knows to ignore that shit. It's a system of mental cheating and lying, and by extension, Marx inherits the same disease. Marx and Hegel both are aware of the nature of their systems, unlike the idiots like Popper who write the stupidest shit.

You don't even know your own thoughts, so why are you lecturing me with your teenaged pissant whining? I'm an old fuck who has seen enough of this shit and actually thought for himself, which you are incapable of doing. The only thing you've done is screech like a fag that I'm a communist and therefore a Bad Man. For one, I'm not a communist and certainly not a Marxist, and for another, your lazy aspersions and knee-jerk reaction to run to Daddy only say anything about you. I really don't give a fuck about that.

The proper conclusion to philosophy is that there is no "being" independent of doing - and if you understood the German idealism you're half-mindedly quoting, you'd get that the project primarily entailed the Krauts' encounter with modernity, and efforts to work within the modern context to preserve the conservative order. Needless to say, it didn't work.

Simple disproof is that speaking of a "substanceless idea" is nonsensical without presuming that ideas are comprised of an imagined substance that must be realized to mean anything. But, metaphysics is not reducible to saying "feels before reals" or "me wantee", as if thoughts commanded reality. Idealist metaphysics does not suggest anything about a mind being whole in the sense that our minds our constituted. Very pointedly, the "mind of God" or "mind" or "idea" in question has nothing to do with human conceits about ourselves which are clearly biological.

Put another way, if you are an idealist, you wouldn't approach consciousness as a scientific question at all, because "mind" in the idealist sense of it would be outside of the purview of science. You couldn't prove with science the idealist perspective, and you couldn't prove with science any metaphysics since science already presumes certain metaphysics to be a valid practice. You could disprove certain metaphysical concepts' validity to the material world that science observes; for example, you can't seriously claim that 2+2=5 because the ideas are contingent on countability as a proposition. You can easily disprove through sense experience anything that suggests 2 and 2 add to anything other than 4. What you're saying is that ideas make reality themselves by magic, and don't care about rationality. You can claim this, but you can't then turn around and use the language of mathematics, logic, or science that would not claim such a position, and bullbait them into accepting because you have institutions with guns and a willingness to hold a knife at our throat if we don't enable your faggotry. It's stupid we even have this conversation, but stupidasses are born every minute.

At the root of this is a liberal conceit that they actually believe they would become gods once the USSR fell and "history ended". Fucking Hegeloids, not even once. That's why they advance this retarded conceit that human thought and consciousness is "just like God". If you understood religious cosmology, accepting the mind of God is really a way of embracing death and something inhuman. It is perfectly acceptable to hold a belief about human consciousness from materialist origins while claiming that God is an overmind. The reason humans can even have faith in a god is because we are something more than bags of chemicals. You want it both ways where your god (Satan) can control reality with superscience in ways that are never consistent, yet you resort to the language of scientism inherited from bastardizations of positivism.

If you did consider what Christianity says, God could have easily decided He didn't want to create Man, or abandon Man to the devil. This is a frequent trope in the religion, even. Nothing about Man was necessary for God to exist in that cosmological view, which means the "mind" in question is something very different from organic consciousness. The question of OP was specifically about human consciousness, which has a very clear origin from natural processes. Human consciousness of the "divine" is really speaking of something altogether different from the mere process of cognition, and again, the language of science to "prove" an irrational claim, or the language of religion to "prove" cognitive processes we know very well from considerable self-awareness and communication and analysis of the human body, is wholly inappropriate.

All of these tired talking points are a known heresy by the way. They were known long before the late 19th century when reactionary eugenists introduced a bullshit pseudo-dogma and said "this is your religion". That was the first step towards demolishing religion, because they were done with that and the nobility always wanted to go full Satanic.

>>207231
i never cared for the mental gymnastics that murderers go through to justify their selfishness. a life is a life and that applies to whatever the fuck is between your legs from its first signs of life. purging society of "people" that regularly get these operations would definitely help us all

>>208159
you didn't address a single point made and instead went on a deranged rant that at best sociologizes and historicizes away the issue at hand, which is a metaphysical one; so i will ignore your unhinged screeching at noble germany and its intellectual tradition.

>"Becoming" is just Germanic gobbledegook
i used the term because of some french philosophers, but that's irrelevant. just replace it by "change" and it's the same thing because i'm using the concept itself. whatever historic or political origin it may have doesn't change anything, just like the symbols for our numbers being of arabic origin doesn't change the logic and meaning of a math proof. existence (which is consciousness) and its transcendental structure is prior to history and politics, and is the necessary condition for them.

>idiots like Popper who write the stupidest shit.
completely true.

>and if you understood the German idealism you're half-mindedly quoting
this would mean something if i had quoted or referenced anything.

>Simple disproof is that speaking of a "substanceless idea" is nonsensical without presuming that ideas are comprised of an imagined substance that must be realized to mean anything. But, metaphysics is not reducible to saying "feels before reals" or "me wantee", as if thoughts commanded reality. Idealist metaphysics does not suggest anything about a mind being whole in the sense that our minds our constituted. Very pointedly, the "mind of God" or "mind" or "idea" in question has nothing to do with human conceits about ourselves
and this would mean something if any of that had been said.

>if you are an idealist [or not a retard], you wouldn't approach consciousness as a scientific question at all, because "mind" in the idealist sense [or any proper sense] of it would be outside of the purview of science. You couldn't prove with science the idealist perspective, and you couldn't prove with science any metaphysics …
this right here proves that your reading comprehension is that of a retarded kid because there was no scientific approach to my argument that consciousness is the fundamental ground of existence, and i actually agree 100% with this quoted bit.

> … since science already presumes certain metaphysics to be a valid practice.
this is where you make a fatal mistake. science by itself is merely a method for investigating how observed phenomena work, and which one will be followed by which other; which by itself is independent of any metaphysical system or position. two scientist can make a great team in deeply furthering the understanding of any one phenomenon, like what role a certain hormone plays in the life of a caterpillar and how that helps explain the role of other hormones in human epilepsy, but have completely opposite and irreconcilable metaphysical views where one is a retarded eliminative physicalist and the other some kind of leibnizian. so from an idealist perspective science is merely telling us what perceptions would be succeeded by which other ones, whereas from a materialist one it would be which states of matter …, etc.

>If you did consider what Christianity says
the only thing more retarded than atheism is a belief in an external God.

>The question of OP was specifically about human consciousness, which has a very clear origin from natural processes.
no, it doesn't, and the fact that you call it "human consciousness" reveals you're utterly lost in the matter. there is no such thing as "human consciousness", or to be more precise, the only thing that makes consciousness "human", and not, say, "penguin", is its content, just as the content of a screen is what determines whether the movie playing in it is a horror or a fantasy one, etc., etc.

consciousness literally cannot be found in the observable world and any of its processes, and that's what causes so much confusion, and why some retards have even come to doubt its existence. that we ascribe the concept of awareness to the observable objects we know as animals and people is no different than ascribing it to Metal Gear Solid NPCs to explain their behavior (that they "notice" the player's avatar, etc.). but if people, animals, waifus, the universe itself, etc., have consciousness, it's because there is a field of experience outside my own field of experience where I perceive them, whose content corresponds to that perspective; just as, if a character in a game is another player and not an NPC, it's because there is a computer outside my computer where that character is the player avatar, etc.

but one knows that consciousness itself exists because it is that in which the observable world and its processes happen, and is therefore prior to any of them, so it is nonsensical to think that it is created by any process within it, as it would be to think that a computer is created because of the interaction between a player avatar's "objective body" with the "objective" game world environment, etc., which is ultimately what materialism/physicalism is truly saying. and even the universe as it exists in itself is only another consciousness, as is my waifu who is not merely perceptions in my own consciousness – despite the nonsensical screeching of godless materialistfags (christfags included).