Henry Stapp - Is Consciousness an Illusion?

Is consciousness something special in the universe, its own category, irreducible to physical laws, a carrier of meaning and purpose? Or is consciousness a mere artifact of the brain, a by-product of evolution, a superstition exaggerated by human misperception? If you think or hope consciousness is special, then you should surely be a skeptic.

Stapp -
 

"Is consciousness something special in the universe, its own category, irreducible to physical laws, a carrier of meaning and purpose? Or is consciousness a mere artifact of the brain, a by-product of evolution, a superstition exaggerated by human misperception? If you think or hope consciousness is special, then you should surely be a skeptic."

It's almost unbelievable that a man of Stapp's caliber could make such an obviously logically ridiculous assertion. What does he think his "human misperception" is if it is not consciousness itself - in other words, in claiming that consciousness must be an illusion he forgets that only a conscious entity can have an illusion. So his assertion inherently assumes the very thing it is trying to debunk - this is immensely self-contradictory and incoherent.

Stapp -
 

It's almost unbelievable that a man of Stapp's caliber could make such an obviously logically ridiculous assertion. What does he think his "human misperception" is if it is not consciousness itself - in other words, in claiming that consciousness must be an illusion he forgets that only a conscious entity can have an illusion. So his assertion inherently assumes the very thing it is trying to debunk - this is immensely self-contradictory and incoherent.

Stapp argues against consciousness being an illusion in the video, the blurb is by Closer to Truth's team.

Stapp's argument is worth a listen because it goes into both philosophy and his interpretation of QM.

Saying consciousness is an illusion is not necessarily the same as saying it does not exist.

Consciousness exists, and is fundamental, it can't be explained in physical terms.

But that doesn't mean it is just what it seems to be. It could be something greatly different from what most people think it is and in that sense it could be an illusion.

I don't really understand what "personal" means.

Individuality exists. Consciousness exists. But you can't see how thoughts, emotions, impulses, or sense of self arise into consciousness. They seem just to pop into awareness from unconscious processes - seemingly from cause and effect via memories, associations, or logic. Even when you feel like you are using your mind to solve a problem, that feeling is just like any other feeling, and where did the impulse to use your mind come from? And it isn't one unified unconscious process it is several that produce thoughts, emotions, impulses, sensory experience. And they can work at cross purposes, we crave food while wanting to lose weight. We have conflicting emotions, conflicting thoughts, conflicting impulses. We "know" we are right but later find out we are wrong. Knowing isn't really knowing, it's actually a feeling.

So do all these disconnected unconscious processes add up to a "person"? Or is the feeling/belief of being a person an illusion like an image made up of pixels?

...

The consequences of this are not nihilistic or emotionally numbing or dehumanizing.

When those unconscious processes understand better what they are, they keep doing their jobs controlling the organism and the mind, but they are much less bound by attachments and aversions. Mental anguish is greatly diminished. They are able to respond to problems with compassion and reason rather than selfish emotions. This is nirvana. People who experience it prefer it to the old way of being.

Something I wrote responding to a different question on another forum:

I dislike the term 'consciousness', it suggests it is a thing, something separate. I prefer to use the term 'experience', and I can't see any way that one can get outside of ones experience. We're stuck, trying to understand our experience, from inside of it. So, as a simplistic example, when scientists do science, they are really only investigating their own experience, and comparing it - by replication - to other scientists experiences. If all the replications agree, these scientists have probably discovered a pattern in nature that we probably all share.

My own research into common anomalous human experiences, seems to shows that people really do have experiences, which are not their own, they are sometimes called apparitions, NDE OBE's, prayer, telepathy, premonitions etc.. These experiences are called anomalous, because we have no publicly released understanding of them at present. They are often labelled in popular literature as things like, dying brain, coincidences, hallucinations etc, but these labels have no explanatory power.

I have no way of knowing whether experience persists independently of the body. Personally, I think this is the wrong question. The right question is how/why do people apparently have experiences which are not their own?

We already know from Juan Maldacena's AdS/CFT correspondence, that information is not likely joined up in the classical way that we naively understand our experiences, i.e. that is that event's are not really causally connected in the way we popularly understand them.

Geoff Penington mathematically showed that matching patterns (information), appear to be connected together by non-traversable wormholes, which is also a way of making connections between things that transcend our naive experience of spacetime.

Nima Arkani-Hamed and friends have been working on a new theory of scattering amplitudes (prediction of the result of particle collisions), in 2020 he revealed a kinematical (without momentum) diagram in spacetime, of the mathematical structure they had discovered from which Quantum Mechanics and Spacetime seems to emerge - right up to cosmological scales. The diagram shows infinitely long cylinders, where points on the surface of these negatively and positively wound cylindrical structures are connected by wormholes, in a way that is not causal.

These sorts of theories, combined with common anomalous human experiences, suggest to me that our experience is generated together in a way that transcends spacetime. And that only matching patterns (whatever these patterns are) can be shared.

One can use a poor analogy of 2x4 lego bricks, as a replacement for Nima's infinite cylinders (above). This is where we all share a mathematical pattern (2x4 lego bricks), but the larger mathematical structures that what we each build out of these shared lego bricks can be different, so that these larger structures may not be shared, even through we still all share the 2x4 lego bricks from which these larger structures are constructed.

That to me seems to be part of the basis of our human condition. If one approaches an understanding of these anomalous human phenomena, as if we are all totally independent bodies, moving around in an independent world, one will always get the wrong understanding... and start talking about (for example) independent things leaving the body, and floating around in an independent world, as a way of trying to make sense of them, using the naive understanding we were all brought up with.

Stapp -
 

It's almost unbelievable that a man of Stapp's caliber could make such an obviously logically ridiculous assertion. What does he think his "human misperception" is if it is not consciousness itself - in other words, in claiming that consciousness must be an illusion he forgets that only a conscious entity can have an illusion. So his assertion inherently assumes the very thing it is trying to debunk - this is immensely self-contradictory and incoherent.

Please listen to the video, which is quite short. I guess the title of the video is a question and he answers NO.

David

Something I wrote responding to a different question on another forum:

I dislike the term 'consciousness', it suggests it is a thing, something separate. I prefer to use the term 'experience', …

Your definition seems rather narrow. Human consciousness also encompasses our capacity for abstract reasoning, which, at this point, appears to be beyond the scope of mathematical description.

Your definition seems rather narrow. Human consciousness also encompasses our capacity for abstract reasoning, which, at this point, appears to be beyond the scope of mathematical description.

What definition are you referring to as narrow?

What definition are you referring to as narrow?

To speak of consciousness as "experience" implies a closely related definition consciousness ≡  experience

To speak of consciousness as "experience" implies a closely related definition consciousness ≡  experience

I don't really understand. Why do you think I define consciousness as identical to experience? Why is it narrow? and how did you intend these things to connect up to your point about things we label as identifying patterns and solving problems, as somehow - I'm assuming - being outside of experience?

You're obviously making some argument, but it's going over my head at present?