>>338298>Saying that consciousness is an emergent hallucination caused by physical atoms going through a mechanical process is exactly the same as saying that humans are brains in vatsNo, it isn't really. You can acknowledge that consciousness is illusory while acknowledging that there is a reality behind it; that is, that it had to emerge from brains in an environment, and that it isn't something independent of that environment. Every attempt to take "consciousness isn't real" to "brains in a vat" has to utilize some sleight-of-hand to explain to us why our sense-information should be wildly out of tune with their interpretation of reality. The simpler explanation is that the world is largely what we do perceive it as - that we exist in a space with other organisms and objects we can touch and see and so on. It doesn't require us to believe that the sense data IS reality, to assert that there is such a thing as reality. The assertion that there is a reality is the first and necessary starting point for any of us to have a meaningful conversation about existence. What we think or sense has nothing to do with FUNDAMENTAL reality - in fact, reality doesn't have a "fundamental" logical construction that is hidden by sense-experience or matter. Reality is what it is, regardless of what we think or sense. Obviously our sense-information is always incomplete.
There is a sleight of hand here - first that Hegelians posit that reality is "not computable", and then simultaneously that there is a hidden idea accessible to those with esoteric knowledge, the mythical "hypercomputation". All of this suggests a belief that human thought and reality are fused at a fundamental level, but our experience of the world - and this should be self-evident - is that what we think and sense is very clearly an imperfect understanding of the real. It is not that matter is obstructing a view of the hidden reality, but that our own thought processes are imperfect and we are not omniscient. Rather than accept this potential that human experience is limited and will always be limited in some way, it is essential for the pretenses of the philosopher that philosophy offers this meta-knowledge to those who are initiated into the priesthood. They have no such meta-knowledge, but for those who seek to command perceptions of reality, they must present themselves as if they do have this ability.
Anyway, the point is that "mind" is a wholly separate thing from "matter", and mind only really exists where there is some physical process resembling the logic. In our sense-experience, we can only ever build models of the world based on our ability to process information. We identify objects, relations between them, etc. and can do so to a very fine degree and observe general laws of motion. No one would assume that the theory itself IS the reality, imposing itself on the physical matter. But in all of our models of the universe, we can only ever work with logical propositions. A must be A, must not be B, and there is no middle ground. All of our understanding of the world is in this prison of logic, because that is all "mind" is capable of processing, or our processing is reducible to those logical propositions if we are to model how we think. There is no other way we could dissect the world for our own brains to process, except to break it down to logical propositions. Even if you broke down information to a wavelength or some non-digital form of information, for us to understand that information requires making logical propositions about its nature, and it can be broken down ultimately into many true-false statements. The obvious problem with that is that there is no reason why anything should exist, and if we accept causality, something cannot emerge out of nothing; nor can we assert through language that there is something fundamental at all in the universe that serves as a building block, except "reality" itself. Our starting point has to be that there is a reality to observe before we can even dissect its constituent parts. All of our definitions of any "fundamental reality" are contingent on other definitions, ad infinitum. Describing reality as "atoms moving through the universe like billiard balls" is not really getting at what reality is, and isn't even a particularly useful understanding of physics. We can make the assertion that matter is comprised of particles, atoms, etc. because we have repeated experiments many times over and found relations between substances, but this is something different from the claim that "the universe is fundamentally made of the atom", as if our investigation of matter ends with a simple assertion of atoms.
My final point then is that consciousness is not something special or "fundamental to the universe" in any way, and this is a dangerous fallacy that has caused untold damage. It is not entirely "illusory" in the sense that our sense-experience is arbitrary - we exist as brains in bodies in a environment because those conditions emerged somehow, and this corresponds to us having a consciousness. The very concept of "self", "existence", and so on is how the matter that comprises our body is able to integrate all that into "me", as opposed to the rest of the world. We necessarily integrate all the constituent parts of our body and our property, the tools we use, and we also integrate our very real relations to each other and other objects in the universe. It would be impossible for "us" to exist without consciousness, and it would be unlikely for anything like animals to exist without some corresponding experience. In the end, though, no force from above actually cares what we think or feel, nor does consciousness provide especial insights or gifts simply because "mind" has any special properties at all. Consciousness and sense-experience are not contingent on reaching an arbitrary level of computational complexity - all evidence suggests that humans are not particularly advanced as a computers at all, and that the development of the human brain over the past few hundred thousand years was not an instantaneous process, gifted to us by a genetic God. It is far more likely that our very experience of consciousness has changed considerably over the course of human existence, to say nothing about the development of individual people throughout their lives.