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Consciousness does not necessarily imply desire for self preservation. There are those who commit suicide for themselves or because their ruler or cult leader c
by Traubenfuchs 5y ago
Consciousness does not necessarily imply desire for self preservation. There are those who commit suicide for themselves or because their ruler or cult leader commanded them.
- pc86 5y agoThe proportion of suicide not linked to propaganda or mental illness is vanishingly small.
- Jiocus 5y agoWhy would a conscious AI be exempt from those conditions or influences?
- DoreenMichele 5y agoThis ends up being "self fulfilling prophecy." If you see people who commit suicide as mentally ill on the face of it, then you will interpret suicide as evidence of insanity. I don't think that is at all accurate. A lot of people who are suicidal are people who have overwhelming problems that they don't know how to solve and when they tell people how overwhelmed they feel to the point of feeling like "Suicide is my only way out of this nightmare," they routinely get dismissed as crazy instead of being given some kind of meaningful help for their problems. PSA: If you (anyone -- not just the person I am replying to) know someone who is suicidal, helping them actually resolve their problems is one way to help them stop being suicidal. I was suicidal for a lot of years. I'm mostly not these days. So firsthand experience informs my opinion on this topic.
- slver 5y agoYour argument makes sense only if mental illness makes you unconscious (hint: it doesn't).
- pc86 5y agoNo, I think you need to reread my statement.
- slver 5y agoYour argument is that suicides are not common when you exclude the common causes. You need a reason to exclude the common causes, a reason that's not "I excluded these because they prove my statement incorrect". And the only valid reason is "I excluded these because they represent people without consciousness, therefore not subject to the current argument about consciousness linked to will for self-preservation". Which is incorrect. Depressed people and so on happen to be conscious. You can't just cherry-pick data and then make general conclusions about the nature of consciousness based upon it.