231–240 of 255 posts
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If you genuinely don't think you are conscious, then I have nothing to say. If you are making a roundabout point of how we can't know if other people are conscious, then my argument about solipsism stands.
He's saying that personal assertions are not a good basis for believing that a person is concious. He's saying it in a sarcastic way.
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See this paper: “If Materialism is True, the United States is Probably Conscious” https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/USAconscious.ht...
This builds on a basic fallacy: 1. According to materialism, consciousness is purely a result of physical processes. 2. Our consciousness is complex. 3. Therefore, materialism says that any physical entity with a complexity comparable to us is probably conscious. At best, going from the two premises to the conclusion involves a tendentious and useless definition of 'consciousness' that equivocates over the specific f…
X = what?
And how can we be sure that, whatever the X is, that the United States does not have it?
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If it can influence how the wave collapses, it is conscious.
That's circular logic with a dubious interpretation of quantum physics. The idea that consciousness could somehow be the cause of the collapse of the wave function is anthropocentrism and shows a poor understanding of what measurement is.
I didn't say cause, I said influence.
You calling it anthropocentric is actually, ironically, pretty anthropocentric of you - assuming humans are the only consciousness in the universe.
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consciousness requires some kind of underlying mental processes Assuming you mean cognition, this is essentially the opposite of the idea of panexperientialism, or at least not compatible.
Yes. The way I think about it, to be conscious, one has to be conscious of something. The only way to do that is to have a representation of that thing in memory. When the representation matches incoming sense data we then perceive the relevant thing. Thus, a single atom cannot be conscious. It could at a stretch be regarded as a miniature body , perhaps, but could it contain a memory system? Presumably not.
The universe is one giant state machine with the memory of it's current state and it's current state deciding what to invoke next.
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Conjecture and speculation, on your part. > if consciousness was created by physical processes, what created the first consciousness? Perhaps a different physical process, since we can see that a physical process is capable of creating consciousness. It seems very plausible that consciousness is simply an emergent property of complex, multi-cellular life. If so, then a better question isn't what created the first con…
i've experienced it, and so can you. don't take my word for it. invest serious time in meditation and if you want a shortcut, drink ayahuasca or consume 5meo-dmt. it is just as scary to realise that your ultimate identity is God (with all the responsibility that entails - full responsibility for your own life and your environment etc), that you are fundamentally alone (we are all the same consciousness experiencing i…
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That's easy to disprove. A calculator isn't sophisticated enough to simulate itself, but a modern computer can perfectly simulate itself.
> That's easy to disprove. A calculator isn't sophisticated enough to simulate itself, but a modern computer can perfectly simulate itself. What you say is pretty obviously false: a computer with finite memory cannot simulate itself in a general case because that would require more memory than it actually has or a compression algorithm that's effective on random data, because its memory would need to contain the emul…
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Probably because consciousness requires some kind of underlying mental processes, which take time to achieve. I can only guess that it's similar to an instance of a computer program such as a web browser, i.e., it isn't a "thing" itself but is built out of a multitude of underlying calculations on a physical computer. This also implies to me that consciousness, not being a physical thing itself, comes and goes within…
consciousness does not require a brain. consciousness is fundamental to the universe
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This builds on a basic fallacy: 1. According to materialism, consciousness is purely a result of physical processes. 2. Our consciousness is complex. 3. Therefore, materialism says that any physical entity with a complexity comparable to us is probably conscious. At best, going from the two premises to the conclusion involves a tendentious and useless definition of 'consciousness' that equivocates over the specific f…
So: Consciousness = Complexity + X X = what? And how can we be sure that, whatever the X is, that the United States does not have it?
Secondly, the burden of proof (or just of showing evidence) rests squarely on the person making the claim that the United States probably has it (whatever 'it' happens to be.) It is hard to do that whan you cannot say, with any specificity at all, what X is.
If your latest post is intended to be a defense of Schwitzgebel's paper, I think you are missing his point. I think he regards the consciousness of the United States counterfactually, and is attempting to show that materialism leads to an implausible conclusion, but he fails to do so, partly on account of the problem I raised in my original post.
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I'm pretty sure that proof of extrasensory experience would yield you a nobel prize, but so far all studies of the subject that I'm aware of were either negative or had their methods heavily critized.
And yet... I use "ESP" all the time, for trivial things: leaving the house so as to arrive at the bus stop just before my bus does. AFAIK, the PEAR lab came closest to formally establishing "psi" (or whatever it is) but never in such a way as to be absolutely incontrovertible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_Engineering_Anomalie... It's almost as if the phenomenon is coy . It's a cultural "blockage": overcome…
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psychedelics are a shortcut for those who don't want to spend time meditating, you can achieve the same result without drugs. it's difficult to convince somebody who hasn't had the experience and of course if you'd had the experience you wouldn't need convincing but i'd suggest you stay open minded and at least try to explore these things when the time is right. and if you won't, it's alright, you'll remember everyth…
> and if you won't, it's alright, you'll remember everything once you die Just like we remember everything from before we're born? Or will we get all that back once we die as well? Why do we lose it all in the middle? What a series of empty, meaningless, unverifiable claims. This is all just drug-fueled pseudo-spiritualism brought on by hallucinations.