(no title)
keiferski | 5 days ago
Anyway, I plan on posting it online somewhere eventually, but HN seems like a good place to throw the introduction out there.
The basic argument I have is that consciousness is a red herring, a concept that was relevant historically but is increasingly routed around by cybernetic systems that aren’t interested in interior states.
Here’s the intro. If you find this interesting, please let me know!
MacGuffin. Whodunit. Smoking gun. Fall guy. The detective fiction genre is an underappreciated source of terminology for unsolved problems, useful not only for criminal mysteries, but also for unanswered questions in philosophy and science. One such term is the red herring: an apparently useful thing, that upon further inspection, is actually a distraction from solving the main mystery at hand.
The concept of consciousness may be such a red herring. It has occupied the minds of philosophers for centuries and increasingly frames debates around AI, animal rights, and medical ethics, among other issues. And yet, even as consciousness is rhetorically dominant, in practice it is increasingly ignored and routed around in real-world situations. When rights are bestowed and resources allocated, the mechanism by which these are done is increasingly uninterested in interior consciousness.
This is not because the problem of consciousness has been solved, or because a revolutionary new theory has novel insights. Rather, it is the natural consequence of cybernetic systems concerned only with output, not internal states or abstract ideals.
What is needed, then, is a genealogy of the concept of consciousness, in the manner of Nietzsche, Foucault, or Charles Taylor. Not a new theory of consciousness, but a story of how the concept developed and came to underlie significant legal, moral, and philosophical systems, and how that foundation is rapidly fading away.
What this genealogy reveals is not merely the history of a single concept or the changing of societal systems, but a deeper human shift: the erosion of interiority itself and the triumph of the external. In simpler terms: a new, largely exterior idea of the self is forming, while at the same time, it is becoming more difficult to conceive of an interior-focused one.
This essay will trace the history of the concept of consciousness, show how it is being routed around by output-focused systems, then ask what effect this has on human life, and how to address it.
tolerance|4 days ago