意识是幻觉还是人心获得的能力？

最近这两天，我又找了一本叫做《牛津通识读本——意识》的书来读。其实这本书很早以前就见过，但当时只看到英文版本，因为专业名词太多，起来实在太累，没有读下来，只是隐约记得其中的一个观点：意识实际上是落后于现实世界的，而且这个延迟还比较长，有半秒钟。现在好了，用AI大语言模型来翻译这些原版英文书，效果非常棒，几乎达到了和人类翻译作者差不多的水平，远远超过几年前的机器翻译。

我之所以选这本书，是因为意识这件事确实是非常迷人。每个人都能感受到一个“我确确实实的存在”，用术语来说就是自觉，这其实是一个很神奇的体验， 这种体验只有我们自己能够确信。如笛卡尔所说“我思，故我在”，虽然我们都认为我们其他的同类都具有自我意识，但是我们实际上并无法确认这件事情。

一个简单的例子，我看见树叶是绿色的，但是我们无法确定别人眼中的绿色和我们感受到的绿色是否相同。也许别人眼中的绿感和我们感受到的红色是一样的体验，这个问题根本无法通过任何实验加以确认。

对于那些与我们人类不同的物种，动物们是否具有自我意识，这是一个非常有争议的话题。多数动物似乎都是依靠着自己的本能在行动，也有很多人认为意识是人类所独有，意识是人类具备的一项可以让人之所以为人的特性，那就是自由意志。人可以根据自己的处境和环境做出选择。

但是长期以来，关于意识的话题一般都是在哲学和宗教领域。因为无法通过实验得出确定的结果，科学家们一直在努力回避这个问题，只有量子力学中的哥本哈根诠释认为，意识是参与物理活动的，是它导致了波函数从叠加态到定态的坍缩。当然这一诠释也受到很多的争议，人们也发明了其他很多诠释来排除意识的作用，比如著名的平行宇宙多世界解释。

但是随着科学的进步，特别是脑科学和神经科学及计算机科学的发展，现在科学家们已经将自己的研究触角深入了这个之前的科学禁区。这本书就介绍了一些这一领域的主要观点。首先，关于意识的起源，也就是它到底是什么，主要有两个观点：一个就是认为意识是一种幻觉，是人类的大脑进化到现在这么复杂的程度时，自然而然产生的副作用，是基于神经活动的，是物理的；另一种就是比较传统的，认为意识确实是与生命的机械活动无关，而是一种人心额外获得的能力，简单说，也就是哲学上的二元论。

宗教来做比方的话，二元论的观点就是绝大部分宗教的观点，就是认为人是有灵魂的，灵魂可以和肉身分离，即便在人死后，灵魂也仍然存在，只是它们去处不同。在一教神论的亚伯拉罕宗教，也就是基督教、犹太教、伊斯兰教中，灵魂最终要么上天堂，要么下地狱，而在印度教中，类似灵魂的事物被称为阿特曼，它会进入无尽的轮回，进入下一个世代。

持前一种观点是宗教，似乎只有佛教，也就是之前多次所说的“无我”，认为并没有一个唯一的灵魂，我们都是因缘聚散的结果。这么说作者似乎也是偏向前一种观点。首先我们来进行一个思想实验，也就是打比方的僵尸，假设一种僵尸，它的行为和人类完全一模一样，面对环境中的各种刺激，也能够做出和人一模一样的反应，但是却没有自我感知。人们其实很容易想象这样一种生物。有在新闻上看到过，拜登在一次访谈中，说他和普京打交道的经历，当然他是在贬低普京的，他说他看向这个人的眼睛，感觉他没有灵魂。就是说很容易将意识和身体想象成是可以分离的,那么科学实验是否也支持呢？你们的感觉呢?下次再接着说吧,今天先讲到这里。

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In the last two days, I have found a book called "Oxford Literacy Book - Consciousness" to read. In fact, I had seen this book a long time ago, but at that time I only saw the English version, because there were too many professional terms, I was too tired to get up, and I did not read it down, but I vaguely remembered one of the views: consciousness is actually behind the real world, and the delay is still relatively long, half a second. Now, the use of AI large language model to translate these original English books, the effect is very good, almost to reach the level of human translation authors, far more than the machine translation a few years ago.

I chose this book because consciousness is a fascinating thing. Each of us can feel a sense of "my actual existence," the technical term for it is self-awareness, which is actually a magical experience that only we can be sure of. As Descartes put it, "I think, therefore I am," and although we all think that our fellow beings are self-aware, we have no way of actually knowing it.

As a simple example, I see that leaves are green, but we can't be sure that the green other people see is the same as the green we perceive. Perhaps the perception of green in the eyes of others is the same experience as the perception of red in our own eyes, which cannot be confirmed by any experiment at all.

Whether or not animals, which are different from us, are self-aware is a very controversial topic. Most animals seem to rely on their instincts to act, but many people think that consciousness is unique to humans, and that consciousness is the one characteristic that humans possess that makes them human: free will. People can make choices according to their situation and environment.

But for a long time, the topic of consciousness was generally in the realm of philosophy and religion. Scientists have been trying to avoid this question because of the inability of experiments to produce definitive results, and only the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics holds that consciousness is involved in physics, causing the collapse of the wave function from superposition to steady state. Of course, this interpretation has been subject to much controversy, and many other interpretations have been invented to exclude the role of consciousness, such as the famous parallel universes many-worlds explanation.

But with the advancement of science, especially brain and neuroscience and computer science, scientists have now extended their research tentacles deeper into this previously scientific off-limits area. This book presents some of the main ideas in this field. First of all, there are two main ideas about the origin of consciousness, and what it really is: one is that consciousness is an illusion, a natural side effect of the evolution of the human brain to its present level of complexity, based on neural activity, is physical; The other is the more traditional one, which holds that consciousness is really nothing to do with the mechanical activities of life, but rather an additional ability of the human mind, which is, in short, a philosophical dualism.

For example, the dualist view, which is the view of most religions, is that there is a soul, that the soul can be separated from the body, that even after death, the soul still exists, but they go to different places. In the monotheistic Abrahamic religions, i.e., Christianity, Judaism, Islam, the soul ends up either in heaven or hell, while in Hinduism, something resembling the soul is called an Atman, and it enters an endless cycle of reincarnation into the next generation.

To hold the former view is a religion, and it seems that only Buddhism, which has been referred to many times before as "no self," holds that there is no one soul and that we are all the result of causes and dislocations. So the author seems to be leaning forward. Let's start with a thought experiment, that is, the zombie analogy, imagine a zombie that behaves exactly like a human, can react exactly like a human to various stimuli in the environment, but has no self-awareness. It's actually easy to imagine such a creature. I saw on the news, Biden, in an interview, said his experience with Putin, of course he was disparaging Putin, he said he looked into this man's eyes and felt he had no soul. So it's easy to imagine that the mind and the body can be separated, but do scientific experiments support that? How do you feel? We'll talk about that next time. That's all for today.