I’ll start by acknowledging that this isn’t my idea, credit to Sam Harris. I also don’t 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:
‘An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.’
It’s 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 don’t believe that, there’s still a greater-than-zero chance you could be wrong. However, this doesn’t 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.
Consciousness is as a convenient abstraction to explain the behaviour of human beings, but it doesn’t really refer to anything real. As such, I think that the claim “consciousness is not an illusion” is technically correct but misleading, since it implies that consciousness exists.
Nagel’s quote is extremely vague, since that ontological “to be” that he uses doesn’t really mean anything.
Just the two cents of some materialistic nobody.
Consciousness as defined by Nagel absolutely exists. If one want’s to define it differently then that’s fair but it’s not really an argument against the statement made in the title anymore then.
I’m not changing definitions. I’m stating that what he defined does not exist.
To go a bit deeper: regardless of whatever that “to be” is supposed to mean, the “subjective experience of what it feels like to be” is still an experience. And experiences do not exist in the physical = real = material sense; they’re solely abstractions. Like valence holes, software, or so many other things that are not real but convenient to explain the behaviour of real things.
The same applies to concepts like “mind”, “soul”, “spirit” and similar.
[No idea on why people are downvoting your comment though.]
But the point is not the ‘to be’ part but the ‘feels like’. It’s quite undeniable that what ever this existence is feels like something. It feels like something to be me, it feels like something to be you, it probably feels like something to be a cat but it likely doesn’t feel like anything to be a rock. General anesthesia doesn’t feel like anything. It cannot be experienced. Consciousness is the ability to have experiences.
I neither said nor implied that the point is that “to be”. I highlighted that, no matter how you interpret it (because it’s vague and meaningless), the conclusion is the same because of the rest - because experiences do not exist in the physical = real = material sense.
“Experiences” includes what we feel (in both senses). What exists is that bloody mess of matter and energy, that’s it.