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if you're asking me, having your consciousness located *precisely* within a single body, forced to experience everything that exists only through this transient interface, with no mathematical explanation of how that is even *remotely logically possible*, is mighty suspicious. something doesn't add up here.
and sometimes it feels like reality does a lot of hullabaloo to distract you from this tiny but fundamental logical incongruity.
It's the only thing that stops me from becoming a mathematical realist. I can't figure out how this is supposed to work.
Illusion of Separation: It sounds like a dis/provable proposition. If it is an illusion, you should theoretically then be able to extend the boundary of self and gain greater cognitive perception and influence; or, going the other way, limit your sense of self further and lose control over some of your limbs. But I have never heard of such things occurring. Hence I believe Separation is no illusion at all, but fact, and any experience of greater or smaller consciousness is in fact the illusion.
Structurally, I have taken on the "emergent perspective" of a brain. Why did I not become a liver, or a lung, or a single cell, or five people, or a whole planet? For small scale, I guess the answer is as usual the weak anthropic principle: only the brain can notice this oddity and communicate about it.
But for larger scale, it doesn't hold: A group of brains can also do this. Yet that is not where I find myself.
Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep" features an alien race of doglike creatures where five puppies or so form a pack, and that pack is the actual consciousness of the person they embody. They speak to each other in "interpack" which is a sound-transmitted form of internal thought, and the novel goes quite into the logistics of puppies joining or leaving the pack, and what a pack with too few puppies is like.
Group mind theory appears often in science fiction, but I wonder how feasible it is.
I will probably be puzzled by this until the very end. Other semi-open questions are e.g. "why three spatial dimensions and not four", but I think I have a good idea there why, and it's a side effect of some kind of energy/information conservation process.
Existential questions are so hard to answer because you only get one specimen to look at. You can imagine theoretical alternatives but it may very well be possible that you're already experiencing the most efficient and only shape of it.
@lritter btw "Orthogonal" trilogy is set in a world with four space-like dimensions (instead of three space-like and one time-like as ours)
@IngaLovinde what, and no time? how does that work? is the trilogy a sculpture?
@IngaLovinde it's too much. i wanted to have a conversation, now i'm supposed to invest my time in a text i don't even know i will like. i like egan, but not _that_ much!
@lritter I'll participate in a conversation a bit later, trying to figure out a mountain trail now!
@IngaLovinde obviously, this has priority. happy hiking!
@lritter There's a real argument whether audio would be high enough bandwidth to carry consciousness. (Plus it would leak, although that's the chaotic "super pack" phenomenon in the book.)
My money is on "no."
@lritter
you can experience your limbs as not part of yourself - but they still do things
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_hand_syndrome
you can't control that though
@mmby all of these effects can be traced back to physical effects on the brain. that is not evidence of an illusion.
@lritter yes, I feel it rather indicates separation
but separation can be a separation by degrees - it can be so smooth as to be imperceptible
I personally feel this way because of how our visual perception works - every glance at the world is in effect an illusion from inference (with central/peripheral resolution, differences in color perception & our blind spot)
why shouldn't consciousness be the same? our experience feels complete but what we're really conscious of is filtered & focused
@mmby i would not call the workings of visual perception an illusion either: but rather the subjective experience of its information consolidating effects. they're not fake or pretend, like a hallucination, but emergent. what you get is real information packeted in a way you can memorize and react to. it would be like saying that software is an illusion. how would doing so help understanding anything better? it's a thought stopper.
@lritter what I mean is that the information is real to you but it may not be congruent with reality
e.g. with the blind spot, your cognizing while perceiving
http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/gif/bscircle.gif
when the blind spot hits that hole in the lattice, your perception completes the lattice - sure, it's adaptation but your body does not have the information what really is in this space of the lattice and you are not conscious that you don't have that information
@mmby i would classify that as artifacts, like pixelated images or jpg compression or streaks on an old TFT, or noise stripes on a VHS video, etc. calling it an illusion is misleading.
@lritter I can see that - I would say the blind spot fill-in effect is akin to extrapolation of missing data
@lritter You can extend the boundary of what you consider self arbitrarily, but that doesn't change how signals propagate and how sensors work.
@lritter I'm leaving towards quantum wave function collapse. If that's not it, then I think we're all actually just random/reactive, and "consciousness" is a signaling system, not actually casually independent.