Everyone likes to believe they’re thinking independently. That they’ve arrived at their beliefs through logic, self-honesty, and some kind of epistemic discipline. But here’s the problem - that belief itself is suspiciously comforting. So how can you tell it’s true?
What if your worldview just happens to align neatly with your temperament, your social environment, or whatever gives you emotional relief? What if your reasoning is just post-hoc justification for instincts you already wanted to follow? That’s what scares me - not being wrong, but being convinced I’m right for reasons that are more about mood than method.
It reminds me of how people think they’d intervene in a violent situation - noble in theory, but until it happens, it’s all just talk. So I’m asking: what’s your actual evidence that you think the way you think you do? Not in terms of the content of your beliefs, but the process behind them. What makes you confident you’re reasoning - not just rationalizing?
Nope, I would have described the split-brain experiments if that’s what I was referring to. I dug around a bit to find a direct reference and I think it was Movement Intention After Parietal Cortex Stimulation in Humans by Desmurget et al. In particular:
I did misremember the fact that they only felt the intention to move, they didn’t actually move their limbs when those brain regions were stimulated.
A related bit of research I dug up on this reference hunt that I’d forgotten about but is also neat; Libet in the 1980s, who used observation of the timing of brain activity to measure when a person formed an intention to do something compared to when they became consciously aware that they had formed an intention to do something. There was a significant delay between those two events, with the intention coming first and only later with the conscious mind “catching up” and deciding that it was going to do the thing that the brain was already in the process of doing.
Probably, I’m less interested in philosophy than I am in actual measurable neurology. The whole point of all this is that human introspection appears to be flawed, and a lot of philosophy relies heavily on introspection. So I’d rather read about people measuring brain activity than about people merely thinking about brain activity.
You can argue it all you like, but in the end science requires evidence to back it up.
Then what do you mean when you’re using the word “consciousness”? Whose definition are you going by?
Loosely, the awareness of our own actions and the reasons why we do them. The introspective stuff that the research I linked to is about.
The specific word doesn’t really matter to me much. Substitute a different one if you prefer. Semantic quibbling is more of what I leave to the philosophers.
You’re calling it “semantic quibbling,” but defining terms isn’t a sideshow - it’s the foundation of a meaningful conversation. If two people are using the same word to mean different things, then there’s no actual disagreement to resolve, just a tangle of miscommunication. It’s not about clinging to labels – it’s about making sure we’re not just talking past each other.
And on the claim that consciousness – in the Nagel sense – is the one thing that can’t be an illusion: I don’t think you’ve fully appreciated the argument if your first response is to ask for scientific evidence. The entire point is that consciousness is the thing that makes evidence possible in the first place. It’s the medium in which anything at all can be observed or known. You can doubt every perception, every belief, every model of the universe - but not the fact that you are experiencing something right now. Even if that experience is a hallucination or a dream, it’s still being had by someone. That’s the baseline from which everything else follows. Without that, even neuroscience is just lines on a chart with nobody home to read them.
You asked:
And I’m answering that. You literally asked for “actual evidence,” and I gave links to the specific research I’m referencing.
I’m not here to argue with you over the meaning of the word “consciousness” when you didn’t even ask about that in your question in the first place. If you think I’m talking about something other than consciousness go ahead and tell me what other word for it suits you.
Introspective narration or metacognitive awareness seems to better describe what you’re talking about rather than consciousness.