If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious (2015)

#81

Post by sullyj3 » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 12:35 AM UTC

elindbe3 wrote: post #72

sullyj3 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this captures most peoples' intuitive notion of consciousness at all. Most people think of it as their directly perceived experience.

I can't really discuss the directly perceived experience of anything other than myself since I have no way of accessing it. I have no way of knowing if you have directly perceived experiences, but I would assume you do since I can see certain characteristics in you. For what it's worth, I actually do think that a collection of people (such as the United States) has directly perceived experiences. That's something tha…

I don't see that it follows that if you don't have access to something, you can't discuss it.

Appreciate your clarification in the second paragraph.

Re: If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious (2015)

#82

Post by sjwright » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 8:01 AM UTC

mensetmanusman wrote: post #66

sjwright wrote: post #53

Earlier 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.

Matters to whom?

Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent

Re: If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious (2015)

#83

Post by sjwright » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 8:16 AM UTC

shoemakersteve wrote: post #75

mensetmanusman wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either everything matters, or nothing matters. Choose one, and follow the resulting consequences.

I really don't understand how you could come to that conclusion. Whether something matters or not is entirely subjective or depends on context. Like, what does that even mean? My happiness matters very much to me, but doesn't matter at all to someone who will never meet me, or to the orbit of the earth around the sun... Yet the mass of the earth objectively matters very much to its orbit around the sun, and to many o…

That kind of statement is fairly routine from people whose world view presupposes godly origin. The unspoken inference is that there must be some objective source of mattering. Whereas if we're all just material, we're all just dust and nothing ultimately matters. It's a play on our emotions. It feels like things matter to us, so it seems intuitively wrong that things could ultimately not matter.

But it's just wordplay. Things DO matter to me. I can care about the fate of my descendents many centuries hence; or the fate of human civilisation in a few millennia. So what if human civilisation (or any biological life of Earth origin) might not survive after a billion years and nothing "ultimately" matters?

Besides, the way most human religions try to instantiate this "ultimate mattering" seems fairly horrid to me.