The Challenge of Consciousness
I promised myself I wouldn&#x27;t follow the Chalmerian rabbit down the consciousness rabbit hole for a while (one eventually gets tired of being dizzy no matter how fascinating the reason). Every time I swear to myself that I&#x27;ll give it a rest for a few months, something like this pops up on HN and it starts all over again.<p>Here&#x27;s as far as I got last time. I&#x27;m almost certainly wrong, but hey, when it comes to consciousness, we know so little that being able to pinpoint why someone is wrong is still progress.<p>- Time is real but not &quot;absolute&quot;. The universe exists as a causally connected network of ever-present nows. We aren&#x27;t &quot;slices of the Minkowski spacetime&quot; experiencing itself. That&#x27;s a fantastic model of reality at certain scales, but it&#x27;s not reality.<p>- Ensembles of causally connected physical systems evolving in the now are &quot;ontoglogically real&quot; in the sense that something about them actually exists above and beyond their parts.<p>- Certain evolving physical systems have &quot;an interior&quot;. It feels like something to be the interior of such a system.<p>- We don&#x27;t experience the world, we experience being the interior of a certain kind of evolving physical system whose job it is to create, process, and manipulate representations. &quot;We&quot; at any moment are the interior of the gestalt representation of that moment.<p>- Evolution selected and maximized interiority for a reason. It has a purpose. How it has a purpose I have no idea, and any solutions smack of dualism. However, the closest thing I have to a hypothesis that isn&#x27;t completely crazy is that what we call &quot;the physical&quot; and &quot;the mental&quot; are simply two projections of some &quot;actual&quot; underlying structure that is something like a Hilbert space. If that&#x27;s the case, then it&#x27;s possible that putting the physical system into a certain state causes the interior of that system to &quot;feel&quot; something which, in turn, causes some kind of &quot;pressure&quot; on the physical again. I have no clue how this could work, but I do like the strategy of starting with the commonsensical but heretical idea that we wouldn&#x27;t be conscious if evolution didn&#x27;t find a use for that property, and then going from there.<p>Anybody else have any crazy thoughts so we can at least talk about why we&#x27;re wrong about them?