What things make you feel disappointed that nobody has solved that problem yet?

It has to be testing for how consciousness is created, I mean, it's as "easy" as just poking around inside people's brains until they start to experience weird stuff. They've even found a "consciousness off switch", but apparently there hasn't been any more discoveries based on that? I guess I understand because it's a weird balance between very important and very unethical:

  • It's extremely important to everyone, in a sense it's the only important thing to anyone. Imagine that someone offered to pay you to take a pill that would wipe out your consciousness, but leave you acting and behaving the same (essentially turning you in to a p-zombie, how much would it cost to get you to take that pill? To me, and to most people, that pill sounds like suicide, it gets rid of the one thing that makes being alive meaningful. If we could figure out how consciousness is created we could potentially upload people or back them up or at the very least keep that part alive even when the rest of the body and brain couldn't be saved.
  • Ethics are pretty much about protecting consciousness. A good definition of consciousness is that it's the ability to feel and remember pain and pleasure and the point of ethics is to try and minimize other people's suffering, or preventing enjoyment, unnecessarily. If we go poking around in someone's brain to try and figure out how consciousness is made and accidentally break the part responsible, that's essentially killing them.

To me, this is the real "hard problem of consciousness", it's so fundamental and important that it's too valuable to do any kind of testing on. Which means that it's incredibly hard to learn anything about, which means that we're undoubtedly missing out on important information about how consciousness works and how to protect or extend it.

/r/AskReddit Thread