QotD: Unified Consciousness

[liveonearth]

I call it conscious realism: Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view. Interestingly, I can take two conscious agents and have them interact, and the mathematical structure of that interaction also satisfies the definition of a conscious agent. This mathematics is telling me something. I can take two minds, and they can generate a new, unified single mind. Here’s a concrete example. We have two hemispheres in our brain. But when you do a split-brain operation, a complete transection of the corpus callosum, you get clear evidence of two separate consciousnesses. Before that slicing happened, it seemed there was a single unified consciousness. So it’s not implausible that there is a single conscious agent. And yet it’s also the case that there are two conscious agents there, and you can see that when they’re split. I didn’t expect that, the mathematics forced me to recognize this. It suggests that I can take separate observers, put them together and create new observers, and keep doing this ad infinitum. It’s conscious agents all the way down.

--Donald Hoffman, Professor of cognitive science UC, Irvine,

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/

Comments

[bobby1933.livejournal.com]

I agree that humans are unable to describe reality. because the information available to our senses does not permit this possibility. I accept that it might threaten our material existence to have such a possibility. But i also doubt that there is material reality "out there" about which truthful statements are possible (except for the Socratic "i know that i do not know." (which, as i reflect on it, might also be erroneous)).

[liveonearth.livejournal.com]

I have NO IDEA what the truth is, as I am only operating from my own perceptions which certainly are filtered. I have decided to just keep going anyway. =-]