Unpopular Opinion

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Consciousness is the only thing in the universe that cannot be an illusion (lemm.ee)

submitted 2 months ago by ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee to c/unpopularopinion@lemmy.world

31 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] Dasus@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

"Credit to Sam Harris"

For something that's a well known saying by Rene Descartes?

"Cogito ergo sum" is exactly "consciousness is the only thing that can't be an illusion"

[–] renedescartes 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Nihil sub sole novum, as it says in the Bible.

(There is nothing new under the sun)

[–] Dasus@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

So your defense of attributing inventions to people who didn't invent them is "well here's a nice passage from the bible, no-one really invents anything anyway".

No they do. They really, really do. Descartes ideas were relatively new.

It was a bit different in say 2000bc or something when there literally wasn't anything new under the sun, as dozens if not more generations would go by without any change in technology or philosophy.

It's very different by the 1600's, as you should know with that username.