Whenever this comes up I have to wonder if half the people are secretly p-zombies and actually genuinely aren't sure whether consciousness is an illusion because they've never experienced it? I know that's not a very charitable take but I just can't see how any conscious being could imagine that consciousness could be an illusion!
Consciousness isn't the illusion, consciousness is the audience!
Yes, we are conscious (or at least I am, I'm assuming y'all are too).
But consciousness isn't static. My consciousness today is not my consciousness of 5 years ago.
I don’t see how one can concretely come to the conclusion of whether it changes or stays the same, when the presence of consciousness itself is a prerequisite of making that very claim
Argument 2:
Could we design a machine that is absolutely sure it’s conscious, but is not? If so, what differentiates us from it? Open question, I’m not sure. But I’d be surprised if we can be permanently sure.
Anyway, isn’t a machine that “is absolutely sure” (of anything at all) having subjective experience (I think is the word, not a brainologist) by definition anyway?
We could clearly design a machine that asserts that it is self aware very strenuously
printf(“I *am* experiencing existence!”);
But as far as I know, not many scientists think this is a reasonable idea.
It can be. Suppose consciousness is a series of infinitesimal snapshots, where existence flickers for a moment and then disappears, with a new existence birthed in the next moment. Like a motion picture, at each moment we do not have a sensible version of consciousness, merely a burst of sensation, but in aggregate, as a film, consciousness springs from nothing.
But it doesn't. Because the film depends on the screen and the projector. This was one of Kant's central points, although he used the fancy term "transcendental unity of apperception". To even experience a set of images as disjointed, to see individual parts as relating to each other there has to be a unified experience judging them as disjointed against, the "thinking I". Without the observer already implicit in the thought experiment about images constituting a film, there is no "film" because nothing in it would have the ability to even conceive of itself as such. Hindus have a very elegant term for this "witness-consciousness" (Atman), importantly like in Kant distinct from ego and mind, not experience but a formal condition for experience. David Bentley Hart also has a great section about this in his recent book:
"Every composite thing, he acknowledges, is an aggregate of several other things, and all its actions are aggregations of diverse actions and accident. [...] If it’s the composite thing that’s doing the thinking, then each part of the composite possesses only a part of the thought, and only in the aggregate is there a complete thought—but then who or what is having that thought? Where does that thought as a unity occur? Can it be just another part of the brain, with its own diverse parts and its own necessary inner coordinating facility? But then that too is made up of partially competent ..."
However, there are gradiations of consciousness. The experience we have on the edge of sleep is qualitatively different than the experience even five seconds after waking up to a cat attack in the middle of the night (I have experienced that).
You mention gradients, which implies you can measure the delta/change of conscious, which implies you have a solid working definition, AND a static still point that does not change which this “consciousness” gradually changes.
From my perspective, which is first person pov, if I can detect changes in my “consciousness”, then where am I looking from to _notice_ this change? Is consciousness not the requirement of change detection?
Whatever consciousness is, it seems vanishingly unlikely that the philosophers talking about it for thousands of years are not talking about this experience I have of being “here now” looking out of my eyes with a constant shower of sensations and interpretations coursing over and by me.
I am not my fingers or hair or forehead in the same vital way that I am this nexus of awareness situated right behind my eyes. But when I am asleep some parts of that awareness are gone. When I am knocked out (by head injury or anesthesia) I so little awareness that I seem to have time traveled when I wake up. (my heart operation seemed to take about one second, and then I teleported to the recovery room).
Sometimes I am very alert, sometimes I am drifting and blinking out. Of course there a gradations of consciousness. Try listening to a book while you are going to sleep.