• Andrew4Handel
    2.5k
    This is what I think has to happen with consciousness and self.

    There are billions of humans but becoming conscious makes you become aware of being only one of them. But why and how?

    Imagine a billion people are unconscious then become conscious why should you become aware of being *person 1* as opposed to *person 2* or person *a billion*? I cannot see a lawful reason.

    What becoming conscious does is situate you as a unique person in a unique location at a unique time.

    To me reincarnation would be less mysterious because you could have one spirit travelling through bodies and time rather than a randomly appearing conscious location. And I think to make a robot conscious you would have to create a subjective centre of experiences and perceiver.

    The best I can explain it is as if a chinese woman in Hong Kong woke in the morning to be Black man in Nigeria. That would seem mysterious (body hopping) but it is actually no less mysterious to become conscious of being a random person in the first place.

    If you can understand this post then you have passed the Turing Test.

    To say brain X leads to consciousness X I think you would have to be able to distinguish two separate entities and give an explicit causal link with no explanatory gap.
    But currently the brain is correlated with private self reports.

    It could be the conscious entity was on another planet using this body as an avatar/vehicle to give responses. I don't think verbal reports logically situate us in our body. Just like reading a post here or listening to someone on the phone doesn't situate them anywhere.
  • Mww
    4.9k
    Your description is one of the interpretations of Aristotle's view of phantasia.Paine

    You mean as in De Anima, or something else?
  • Paine
    2.5k

    Yes, De Anima along with On Memory.
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