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.
But from what perspective?
If you take the perspective of someone inside the illusion/simulation, they could be simulated consciousness. But at the same time, from the outside, it isn’t actually consciousness because it’s all programmatic.
Now, it could be said that any sufficiently complex simulation that mimics consciousness within its parameters is creating consciousness, but it’s still the illusion of consciousness rather than the actual thing. Which perspective is real?
Does realness, as in an absolute and objective reality, even matter for consciousness?
Me, I err on the side of any consciousness that is internally perceived as consciousness is real in any meaningful sense, even if it isn’t objectively real.
If I dream, and other entities in my dream experience consciousness within themselves, I would call their consciousness real, even though they aren’t real. It would be a created, artificial consciousness, it might even be a lesser form of consciousness, but it would still have a given value of realness.
Which, as a side note, dreams where you switch between multiple perspectives as different entities (not always people), and even have different thoughts as different entities are a fucking trip. They’re rare, but so damn amazing to experience.
Maybe that kind of dream is creating consciousness, maybe it’s perceiving some external consciousness. But it’s still a discrete consciousness within itself.
In other words, if it’s an illusion that the consciousness typing this is consciousness, then it is such a complete consciousness that it is the same as whatever external consciousness created it. It’s subjectively real, and that matters more than any objective reality.