'Consciousness' is one of those viral memes which generates value for its users much like a pump-and-dump scheme, it gets more real and intriguing the more people you get on board, sorta like 'Race'.
You can tell because, like Race, the minute you start asking after details, or why its even operative or a term of art in the first place, the coherency reveals itself as brittle spaghetti statements all the way down. Its fascinating that we're kinda okay building a science around a term that isn't simple or exhaustively unpacked in terms of all constraint on its definition, like anything we can describe mathematically.
But humans are fascinated by meaning (which is completely tied to notions of providence [I can't think of a human culture that doesn't have an idea of providence/final destination]), truth hiding beneath the surface, possibility lurking just right around the corner. We know by looking at so-called animal life: YAGNI as far meaning goes. Human beings are addicted to revealing, to un-covering. Even though in reality there is nothing hiding, nothing "covered', no truth beneath the surface, no depth to any of the superficiality.
But perhaps, if our brains really are 'prediction machines', then perhaps past a certain threshold, it has to start "making meaning", which is to predict truth (at least at a social level, when it no longer has more to process in physical reality. It does this merely by virtue that the machine cannot stop predicting, even when there's nothing more to predict. Hence Nietzsche: "Man would rather will nothingness than nothing at all".
The upside for human animal life is that all this meaning-seeking activity makes us super unpredictable in response to inputs, moreso than most if not all animals. And unpredictability creates more possibility, so we simply will reap more rewards than other animals by shear frequency of being batshit, but we equally creates new and different problems for ourselves as well.
But its also why the vast majority of people cannot be scientists (or sociopaths, for that matter): their brains have a hard time sticking with utter simplicity; there always has to be more than there is.
This is how our form-of-life drifts through the universe. Gorillas sometimes eat their own shit. We don't know why. But is it any more or less valuable than our meaning-making activity? Maybe not.
You can tell because, like Race, the minute you start asking after details, or why its even operative or a term of art in the first place, the coherency reveals itself as brittle spaghetti statements all the way down. Its fascinating that we're kinda okay building a science around a term that isn't simple or exhaustively unpacked in terms of all constraint on its definition, like anything we can describe mathematically.
But humans are fascinated by meaning (which is completely tied to notions of providence [I can't think of a human culture that doesn't have an idea of providence/final destination]), truth hiding beneath the surface, possibility lurking just right around the corner. We know by looking at so-called animal life: YAGNI as far meaning goes. Human beings are addicted to revealing, to un-covering. Even though in reality there is nothing hiding, nothing "covered', no truth beneath the surface, no depth to any of the superficiality.
But perhaps, if our brains really are 'prediction machines', then perhaps past a certain threshold, it has to start "making meaning", which is to predict truth (at least at a social level, when it no longer has more to process in physical reality. It does this merely by virtue that the machine cannot stop predicting, even when there's nothing more to predict. Hence Nietzsche: "Man would rather will nothingness than nothing at all".
The upside for human animal life is that all this meaning-seeking activity makes us super unpredictable in response to inputs, moreso than most if not all animals. And unpredictability creates more possibility, so we simply will reap more rewards than other animals by shear frequency of being batshit, but we equally creates new and different problems for ourselves as well.
But its also why the vast majority of people cannot be scientists (or sociopaths, for that matter): their brains have a hard time sticking with utter simplicity; there always has to be more than there is.
This is how our form-of-life drifts through the universe. Gorillas sometimes eat their own shit. We don't know why. But is it any more or less valuable than our meaning-making activity? Maybe not.