6 ms·
How do I know you have this "self"? How do you know other humans do?
by vidarh 6mo ago
How do I know you have this "self"?
How do you know other humans do?
- ofjcihen 6mo ago[flagged]
- vidarh 6mo agoAd hominems are always a nice way of getting out of answering something you have no answer to.
- vixen99 6mo agoIn other words, you don't think it's nice at all.
- vidarh 6mo agoYes, it is rather overt sarcasm.
- amenhotep 6mo agoIt's not an ad hominem. In fact, it's perhaps the most good faith interpretation of your words possible. Ad hominem would be calling you stupid because you obviously know that you have a self and only your own stupidity could explain your inability to see how your self is generalisable. When you go around pretending you genuinely think maybe humans don't have selves, really the only way to take you seriously is to think that maybe you're a p-zombie.
- vidarh 6mo agoIt was an ad hominem, and so is this. I do not pretend. I asked honest questions that clearly neither you nor the previous person are able to answer.
- svachalek 6mo agoBy the laws of physics, it's pretty clear we don't. The same chemical and electromagnetic interactions that drive everything around us are active in our brains, causing us to do things and feel things. We feel like we're in control of it, we feel like there's something there riding around inside. We grant that other people have the same magic, because I clearly do. But rocks, trees, LLMs, those are not people and clearly, clearly not conscious because they don't have our magic.
- vidarh 6mo agoIndeed. We assume a lot, because we don't know. We don't have have settled, universal definitions of what consciousness means. But that also means that while we like to rule out consciousness in other things, we don't have a clear basis for doing so.
- root_axis 6mo agoBased on that reasoning anything could be conscious. If that's a bullet you want to bite, fair enough.
- kortex 6mo agoI'll bite that bullet. In fact I contend the idea that "humans and maybe some animals are conscious, but other things are not" is the special pleading stand. Why are the oscillating fundamental fields over here (brains) special, but the oscillations over there (computers, oceans, rocks) not? If they are, where do you draw the line? It smacks of "babies dont feel pain" (widely believed until the 80s! the 1980s!) sort of reasoning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
- root_axis 6mo agoActually I don't really have any problems with panpsychism. It's a pretty uncommon perspective, but when discussing conscious machines, it at least presents a consistent criteria for consciousness.