/sci/ - Science & Math

Why do people not understand that consciousness is an illusion? Why do they so desperately want to believe in magical or supernatural qualia?

Qualia don't exist. Free will doesn't exist. We are biological machines. Only /x/ schizo's disagree.

Qualia don't exist. For example consider a man who says "my taste has changed". Can we distinguish whether his qualia have changed and his value judgments remained the same or his value judgments have changed and his qualia remained the same? We can't. Therefore qualia are wrong.

Pain is an illusion.

>>15585267
>What the fuck is consciousness, scientifically speaking?
An illusion

>The patient failed in all tasks in which he was required to match the seen color with its spoken name. Thus, the patient failed to give the names of colors and failed to choose a color in response to its name. By contrast, he succeeded on all tasks where the matching was either purely verbal or purely nonverbal. Thus, he could give verbally the names of colors corresponding to named objects and vice versa. He could match seen colors to each other and to pictures of objects and could sort colors without error. (Geschwind and Fusillo (1966)

Is this an actual case of inverted qualia?

Thought experiment. Let's assume scientists develop a machine that allows to connect two humans in such a way that one of them can experience the world from the other's subjective first person perspective. That would solve the hard problem of consciousness, wouldn't it?
Now imagine you and your buddy are connected to that machine. You can see the world from his eyes. You observe that indeed his qualia spectrum is inverted. When you see a red object through his eyes it looks blue for example, though both of you call the color "red" when communicating.
Here comes the plot twist. The scientist looks at the machine and says "Let's try switching these two plugs of the input channels. They should be interchangeable anyway." He switches them, and suddenly the qualia inversion is gone. You still see the world from his eyes and his red now looks like your red.
How could we tell the source of the inversion? Can we attribute it to the input configuration or are your buddy's qualia actually inverted and the first configuration was the right one? What if the second configuration was actually an additional inversion?

Is happiness just an illusion? After all, it's just a bunch of hormones in our brains.
What is it about these hormones that implies the actual experienced feeling of happiness?
If we arranged a flask full of hormones, some sensor and electrical wiring in the right way could we create an artificial entity that experiences happiness?

Imagine an AI being given the task to intentionally argue a wrong point, to tell lies or to present falsehoods. Would this AI subjectively experience cognitive dissonance? Or is the experience of cognitive dissonance a quale unique to the conscious human being?

What is the mechanism behind complex illusions like consciousness or free will? How does our brain trick itself into believing that it has subjective experience?

>consciousness is an illusion
>free will is an illusion
>time is an illusion
>causality is an illusion
>temperature is an illusion
>centrifugal force is an illusion
>entropy is an illusion
Why is science so obsessed with disillusioning the world?

Cognitive science question. Can an illusion itself be an illusion? Is there a word for a meta illusion where you erroneously believe something to be an illusion even though it actually isn't?

Is temperature just an illusion? A single particle doesn't have a definite temperature. It only has a velocity. Same applies to an ensemble of particles. What your thermometer is measuring is merely a statistical quantity of particle collisions. There is no such thing as temperature. When you say something is hot or cold you're merely saying you experience more or less particle collisions. Time to drop the old folk thermodynamic vocabulary of temperature.

*solves the greatest mystery of cognitive science*
Hehe nothin personell, kid