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Monday, January 2, 2012

Consciousness

How certain do you really feel about who/what you are?
What do you identify yourself as? Your experience, your social identity, your body, your brain, all of the above? Any preference?

Is your experience reducible to neurophysiology, or is it made of "qualia" which are irreducible, and/or require a new ontology?
In other words, does experience have its own discrete "atoms", like matter, or in the same sense that color can be reduced to primary colors, secondary colors, etc.?


What is the value of experience in relation to other things? Could you see value in a universe without experience? If you were convinced that experience was the product of a kind of machinery, how would that affect the value of experience, or your sense of authenticity, if at all?


How does experience relate to behavior and causality? Why did evolution select for it? Is our inner life necessary for our bodies to behave adaptively?


Why is the inner life always "now"? Are "now" and consciousness even separable? Many physicists, including Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Steven Hawking have said that our experience of time is an illusion, or that the past, present, and future exist simultaneously in a timeless reality. Can consciousness be explained purely by neurophysiology or psychophysics, or do we need to explain a particular conscious moment's relation to space and time to understand it?

Also, is the difference between the subjective and objective merely a matter of perspective? if so, where does this perspective come from?

Introductory reading:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580394,00.html

http://www.kurzweilai.net/my-question-for-e...


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