221–230 of 377 posts
> In almost all other societies and civilizations, including medieval Europe, the sun and other heavenly bodies were thought to be alive and intelligent.
It was also thought that the stars were fixed to a celestial sphere. Just because a lot of ancient civilizations adhered to an idea doesn't necessarily mean that idea has any merit.
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This doesn't make sense. In the case of humans and animals, consciousness is a way to adapt to the environment to protect their lives, fulfill their needs and eventually reproduce. Consciousness is useful for life. But in the case of the sun, what is it adapting to, and what does it have to protect? Nothing. The fact that consciousness appears always in populations might be essential. Consciousness was the result of…
The lifetime of the Sun is so much larger than that of a human being, that the latter would be unable to fathom the life of the Sun. At least this human doesn't. If a human cell, say, had intelligence comparable to that of a human, would such a cell be able to fathom the life of its “host”? Hardly. According to Earth science, the Andromeda Galaxy is scheduled to collide with the Milky Way in around 4.5 billion years.…
The tragedy (depending on how you look at it) with discussions about consciousness is that any possible consciousness we envision is inevitably human-like. We wouldn’t see it as “consciousness” even if it was only somewhat different from ours (animals); a consciousness that is really different may look to us like any natural process. A question of “is X conscious?” has no meaning if you remove that constraint of “hum…
I think you can envision “non-human-like”. Eg we already imagine animals can be conscious. Conscious just means an intelligence that is self-aware and has subjective experience. If you define that as human-like then your point stands tautologically. But I think there is a very wide space of conscious possible-minds. Simple examples would be hive-minds, faster minds, slower minds, distributed minds, quantum minds, it’…
The tragedy (depending on how you look at it) with discussions about consciousness is that any possible consciousness we envision is inevitably human-like. We wouldn’t see it as “consciousness” even if it was only somewhat different from ours (animals); a consciousness that is really different may look to us like any natural process. A question of “is X conscious?” has no meaning if you remove that constraint of “hum…
> We wouldn’t see it as “consciousness” even if it was only somewhat different from ours (animals); Most humans see animals as having a consciousness with feelings and dreams like us. Why would you think otherwise? Why else would it be illegal to torture animals? That we even call it "torture" means we think the animals suffers from it, we don't say we torture a rock when we crack it, that means we see them as having…
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Psychedelics are very likely the basis of many religions, including Christianity. Having magical religious experiences on LSD is practically a meme, so I am not sure what would lead you to suggest otherwise.
Christianity was founded as a monastic, ascetic, apocalyptic sect in antique judaism, and got the shape recognisable to most of us through roman imperial politics. If you think those jews or romans used psychedelics I'd like to know why. There might be traces of cannabis in the hebrew Bible but it's not a common theme and pretty much every word this idea is usually based on could be a reference to something else. The…
Dionysian festivals, although not proven (it's hard to find samples of ancient ritual wine), are strongly suspected to mixed something psychedelic (probably ergot) into wine as part of their ceremonies. Of course, that trance inducing wine was the blood of Dionysus. And how could it not be? You drink it and feel the essence of a god right after (the trip).
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> Literally our entire civilization is built on the idea that humans have qualia and therefore causing harm to humans is often unethical. Here's an alternative angle that doesn't lead to dystopia: Humans generate knowledge. Causing harm to knowledge is unethical. Broad human rights protect humans as knowledge generators (now or in the future or in potential) without going through the fraught process of arguing about…
Knowledge is too broad a concept to protect all of it. Taking it to the extreme would probably mean that all output of /dev/random should be treasured in multiple backups, to avoid any bits to die.
> Most researchers agree that consciousness is somehow related to the electrical activity of brains. Some go further and propose that brains’ electromagnetic fields actually are conscious. I am not knowledgeable at all here so I'm just going to talk out of my butt for a second but this seems testable. Does disrupting the electromagnetic fields in the brain disrupt consciousness?
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“Answers” is a word that hints that you are still thinking of it as human-like consciousness. A valid point could be that our consciousness is social (“answering” is a thing), and by extension any alien consciousness we expect would also have to be social as one of the constraints that make it sufficiently human-like.
Is there any other definition of consciousness than one of a subjective experience that observes and reacts to its environment?
As far as consciousness that doesn’t react, there are materialist/behaviourist/illusionist views that hold that only observed behaviour matters and anything else may well not exist, but I personally am not convinced by them.
Someone ought to trick analytic philosophers into taking some of the more popular psychoactive substances, so they finally discover how tightly coupled consciousness is to the matter in the nervous system and stop their embarrassing search for Holy Spirit. Also, the sun is clearly an anus: "The simplest image of organic life united with rotation is the tide. From the movement of the sea, uniform coitus of the earth w…
> so they finally discover how tightly coupled consciousness is to the matter in the nervous system and stop their embarrassing search for Holy Spirit How would that explain out-of-body/near-death experiences? They happen to people, it's a fact. Sometimes people gain new information during them that they couldn't have possibly hallucinated by themselves, like being able to repeat a conversation that took place in ano…