No - an "illusion" could simply be erroneous effect of data - what the "conscious" thing senses is not necessarily what's there - no presumption required. On 5 Aug 2013, at 01:31, Dan Asimov wrote:
When you call consciousness an illusion, the concept of an illusion already presumes that consciousness is a known concept. So this seems circular to me.
--Dan
On 2013-08-04, at 4:49 PM, Thane Plambeck wrote:
here is a (presumably hopeless) attempt to define consciousness.
it's a cruel world that wants to eat you. consciousness seems to me to be an adaptive darwinian illusion that organizes your ultimately biological responses to threats in full consonance with the laws of physics, and favors the transmission of your genes to future generations. although some debate it, it seems clear to me that animals have something like it, and even insects, or bacteria, or even a finite automaton transducer that keeps a simple state somehow in memory and responds to external stimuli in consonance with physics. and just as they might have an ever more primitive consciousness than ours, it seems just as likely that much "higher" forms could exist, also.
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