The only observer of the mind would be an outside observer looking at you. You yourself are not an observer of your own mind nor could you ever be. I think it was Feuerbach who originally made the analogy that if your eyeballs evolved to look inwardly at themselves, then they could not look outwardly at the outside world. We cannot observe our own brains as they only exist to build models of reality, if our brains had a model of itself it would have no room left over to model the outside world.
We can only assign an object to be what is “sensing” our thoughts through reflection. Reflection is ultimately still building models of the outside world but the outside world contains a piece of ourselves in a reflection, and this allows us to have some limited sense of what we are. If we lived in a universe where we somehow could never leave an impression upon the world, if we could not see our own hands or see our own faces in the reflection upon a still lake, we would never assign an entity to ourselves at all.
We assign an entity onto ourselves for the specific purpose of distinguishing ourselves as an object from other objects, but this is not an a priori notion (“I think therefore I am” is lazy sophistry). It is an a posteriori notion derived through reflection upon what we observe. We never actually observe ourselves as such a thing is impossible. At best we can over reflections of ourselves and derive some limited model of what “we” are, but there will always be a gap between what we really are and the reflection of what we are.
Precisely what is “sensing your thoughts” is yourself derived through reflection which inherently derives from observation of the natural world. Without reflection, it is meaningless to even ask the question as to what is “behind” it. If we could not reflect, we would have no reason to assign anything there at all. If we do include reflection, then the answer to what is there is trivially obvious: what you see in a mirror.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yeah. But we don’t know how it’s happening.
No, it’s not.
Nope. No one is consciousness forever.
That’s a pretty basic one
Ok.
Now, I know you didn’t mean to, but you may have just said something that’s correct, and I’m almost certain you did so unintentionally.
But over the very very short amount of time we’ve been looking I to this, yes there is a theory that what people think of a consciousness is not actually driving the bus. It’s a bored kid in the backseat daydreaming about why what they see out the back window is what’s outside.
The kid has no control over what they see. They’re not driving the bus or have any influenece over what they see out that window.
But the theory came about because we couldn’t measure the speed of thought back in like the 80s, maybe 70s.
When we could measure faster, it looked like we had been wrong.
Then even later we took that back and said it could be possible that that multiple different things in our environment happen different ways, then an incredibly small amount of time later that quantum wave collapse (happening millions or billions time a second) collapses those different options into a “one true timeline”.
And if that is what’s going (literally uncountable, billions and billions time a second) then maybe we really are just the kid in the back of the bus pretending we’re flying over a landscape with no control over where we’re going.
What’s really calling the shots on what we do isnt just “a Busdriver” either, if it’s not our consciousness running things, it’s a whole bunch of different parts of our bodies that have neurons, some of which are in the brain and some aren’t.
I really really don’t think that’s what you’re trying to say, but you did touch on something that could be possible.
Because again, we do t know and in all likelihood even if humanity figures it out some day, it’ll be generations from now at best