Hacker News

Not op, but I often do say 'whilst' out loud. It feels more structured and certain than 'while', which feels floppier as a word.

No offense taken; I do say it out loud during conversations ; at times. I find myself ‘saying’ it more in my head whilst having a stream of consciousness moment.

I find that I have two personalities and my writing/text personality is much more sagacious and better spoken (if that makes sense??)

How can qualia be experienced if not from a conscious observer? It's the same question as asking if a tree falls in the woods with no one to hear or know about it.

No disagreements with what you said in your first paragraph.

> I'm sure qualia is created not by consciousness

Whether or not qualia is created by consciousness, I don't see how we necessarily can tell one way or the other. We don't exactly have great introspective tools to do such self analysis, not to mention what we think we feel is often illusory/not reflective of reality.

An anecdote to demonstrate the point.

I broke my leg recently. Shortly after that I've lost my consciousness. It was very painful, the body reacted with a lot of adrenaline, and after a several minutes when adrenaline was drained away my consciousness was drained too.

I experienced something like this several times, though not to the point of fainting. But this time was special in other way too: I had friends near me, they observed me through all the process and we could compare our observations later. It seems, that my memory stopped recording before I fainted. I was still operating to some extent, but I couldn't remember a thing. When asked something I grunted in answer. When one of my friends insisted that I stand up and come to a better place to sit down, I actually stand up and did several steps before stopping and slowly (and carefully) sank to the ground. (An interesting observation, my controls over my body were weakening, but I was still using them for what they worth. It fits with all other similar experiences: the limbs and all the muscles seem to be losing their strength, and it takes a lot of will to make them work.)

On the light of this, I'm very interested what proponents of the idea, that feelings need consciousness to work, would say about my half-unconscious state. Did I feel myself extremely bad at the time? Or maybe I didn't feel anything? My friends are sure that the former statement is true, but they may be mistaken by my outside looks. I personally don't remember. Up to some point I remember that I felt really bad, but the next thing I remember I look at the sky and I'm surprised by what I see (I was not in a place I expected to be). And at that moment I was pretty ok already, no more adrenaline issues, just my leg was aching.

Was I experiencing qualia is another interesting question. I'm pretty sure I was, but I'd like to hear an argument for the opposite.

I don’t disagree with the general point here but the attraction of that argument has surely drifted much in ~5y.

I’d be REALLY curious to see a survey of philosophy 2015 vs 2025 UG entrants on mind-brain connection intuitions

Maybe I just know how it's like to be a bat.

Or is the small part the bit where the least useful stuff happens? ;-)

A bit more seriously, the brain actually uses a significant chunk of the body's energy budget (no matter how efficient it is relative to human made equipment). So evolutionarily, it doesn't make sense unless it's doing something exceptionally useful.

No, definitely not. Our consciousness is honestly an afterthought, as the brain processes mountains of information that does not even get to out conscious level yet is arguably more useful than anything we primitive primates can think of.

It's the part that makes everything useful happen but most of everything useful happens in unconscious parts of the brain and even outside of the brain.