Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'll figure it out eventually.
You can do better than that.
Everyone can do better.
If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious (2015)
61–70 of 83 posts
Re: If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious (2015)
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't understand how the United States is reasonably bounded for this example. I'm bounded by my body, which travels together. You are also comprised of billions of living cells (not to mention trillions (?) of other organisms like gut bacteria). And you're in constant interaction with your environment (e.g. inhaling more bacteria, oxygen, proteins, and so on). Cells also drop off you all the time. Plus, doesn't…
But I am distinct from my dropped cells, and from other people, and from environments when I cease interacting with those things. America has a physical border, but people within that border are constantly interacting with people outside of it.
>America has a physical border, but people within that border are constantly interacting with people outside of it.
To a much less degree than with those inside it. And they don't decide all together, or act all together to the degree America decides for itself (same with you and e.g. your family: you might make decisions together, but you take 1000x more decisions/actions by yourself every day).
Re: If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious (2015)
#63Reminds me of this dialogue from Gödel, Escher Bach: https://people.whitman.edu/~herbrawt/classes/110/Hofstadter....
Re: If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious (2015)
#64I think groups of people are conscious in a sense. When I say conscious I'll use a definition where consciousness is the behavior of a physical system that is: * directional/goal oriented * exhibits higher order patterns / behaviors which are greater than the sum of its parts. A riot would probably be the easiest example to start with. You get a group of mildly angry people together and they can become enraged and do…
I don't think this captures most peoples' intuitive notion of consciousness at all. Most people think of it as their directly perceived experience.
Re: If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious (2015)
#65I think groups of people are conscious in a sense. When I say conscious I'll use a definition where consciousness is the behavior of a physical system that is: * directional/goal oriented * exhibits higher order patterns / behaviors which are greater than the sum of its parts. A riot would probably be the easiest example to start with. You get a group of mildly angry people together and they can become enraged and do…
I don't know what it means to define consciousness without self awareness. Sounds like just emergent behaviors.
> I don't know what it means to define consciousness without self awareness
Any entity capable of suffering presumably counts as being conscious. (I'm not claiming the converse here, though.) I don't see an obvious reason why every entity capable of suffering must necessarily be capable of self awareness.
With the right blend of psychotropics, I suspect it would be possible to dissolve a person's sense of self while still causing them to suffer. They would still count as being conscious.
Re: If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious (2015)
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you’re a materialist, there is no reason to have hope, you’re just reacting to stimulus.
Not at all. Hope and love don’t need to have any meaning in the wider universe in order for them to have meaning to me. Serious question—how does the notion of "hope" become any more concrete in the non-materialist view? Perhaps your immortal soul can "hope" that it hasn't been attached to a physical body with a physical brain tumour pressing upon its physical amygdala. Personally I cannot see how non-materialism use…
Either everything matters, or nothing matters. Choose one, and follow the resulting consequences.
Re: If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious (2015)
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not at all. Hope and love don’t need to have any meaning in the wider universe in order for them to have meaning to me. Serious question—how does the notion of "hope" become any more concrete in the non-materialist view? Perhaps your immortal soul can "hope" that it hasn't been attached to a physical body with a physical brain tumour pressing upon its physical amygdala. Personally I cannot see how non-materialism use…
Either everything matters, or nothing matters. Choose one, and follow the resulting consequences.
Trite aphorisms don't matter, but I don't think that means nothing does.
Re: If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious (2015)
#68Re: If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious (2015)
#69> If we set aside our morphological prejudices against spatially distributed group entities, we can see that the United States has all the types of properties that materialists tend to regard as characteristic of conscious beings.
This doesn't seem true. Surely, one of these properties is some level of near real-time rich interconnection between all of the various IO ports and computation centers. There is some separability, obviously. I can cut off my arm and remain conscious, but my arm (for the short period before it bleeds out and dies) is presumably not part of "me" any more even if it remains conscious as a separate entity. The overall network needs to remain more or less non-partitioned for the entirety of the time it is considered to be one individual. Groups of people definitely do not have this property, though we could in the future via direct brain interfaces to the Internet.
Re: If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious (2015)
#70All of reality is fundamentally made up of atoms. If you are an atomist, you believe that consciousness is ultimately derived from a special arrangement of atoms. A rock is made of atoms, QED: rocks are conscious.
/s