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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29309 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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This does not answer the question. Just because you might be incurious about the experience of self-awareness and only thinking in terms of practical application, doesn't mean others aren't.

I'm very curious, I just don't find it mysterious. Like everything else in the universe it is based on real phenomena and understandable.

It might be in principle understandable, or it might not be. In any case, I think the fact of the matter is that neither you nor I understand it. And neither does anyone else, as far as I can tell. You do not know how the physical universe gives rise to consciousness, nor do I. If you did understand it, you would be able to provide an explanation. "If you make a thinking system complex enough consciousness is an emergent property. All it needs to do is to be able to reflect on itself." is not an explanation, because there is no good reason to believe that it is true. Even if it were true, that would not necessarily explain consciousness, subjective experience. It would just add one more fact to what we already know about the correlation between physical states and self-reported consciousness, such as "if a person takes sleeping pills, they self-report losing consciousness and then regaining it at some point later". None of that necessarily brings us closer to explaining what subjective experience is or how physical reality gives rise to it (if it even does at all).

All phenomena that are in the universe are real by definition, yes. But you seem to believe that we're as close to understanding subjectivity as we are to understanding self-reflection.

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