[prolyxis]

I am hopeful that advances in brain-computer interfaces will start to provide a partial answer to the question of "what's there" and why it's there. It seems to me the ability to controllably augment one's own consciousness with precision will tremendously clarify the necessary ingredients for consciousness.

[anon84873628]

Neuroscience has already done lots of investigations as to what's there and why. We know which structures in the brain do what (including "consciousness") at an increasingly fine level. We can observe all sorts of brain disorders and dysfunctions and their effect on consciousness. You can do drugs yourself to alter the ingredients of consciousness.

I think people just don't like how boring the answer is.

[anon-3988]

No, I don't think you understand how fundamentally hard the question is. See the hard problem of consciousness[1]. When you think about gravity, you can imagine a universe where gravity is reversed. All of the physics seems mechanical, or probabilistics or whatever. But "there's there there" is a completely different phenomena that I think we will never have an answer for.

There doesn't seem to be a continuity, either something is there, or there isn't. You can be drunk, hallucinating, feel extremely dizzy, trapped in a vat, trapped inside another universe inside vat, trapped as a figment of reality of other beings, but the fact that "there's there there" is binary. It is something that cannot be divided or peeked into. A kind of fundamental atomic property.

1. https://iep.utm.edu/hard-problem-of-conciousness/

[lottin]

I think the main ingredient is a living being.

[Thiez]

Why?