131–140 of 306 posts
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I love this, hope it takes off like "enhsittification" or "slop" have already.
Uhgh "slop" is ok but "enshittification" was lame from the start.
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“The Feeling of What Happens” by Antonio D’Amasio, a book by a neuroscientist some years ago [0], does an excellent job of building a framework for conscious sensation from the parts, as I recall, constructing a theory of “mind maps” from various nervous system structures that impressed me with a sense that I could afterwards understand them. [0] https://www.labyrinthbooks.com/the-feeling-of-what-happens/
As a radical materialist, the problem with ordinary materialism is that it boils down to dualism because some types matter (e.g. the human nervous system) give rise to consciousness and other types of matter (e.g. human bones) do not. Ordinary materialism is mind-body/soul-substance subjectivity with a hat and lipstick.
I find myself believing in Idealism or monism to be the fundamental likelihood
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The way I understand it the second thing is the observer of the organism, the person posing the question. The definition seems to be sort of equivalent to the statement "an entity is conscious IFF the sentence 'what is it like to be that entity' is well-posed". "What is it like to be a rock" => no thing satisfies that answer => a rock does not have unconscious mental states "What is it like to be a bat" => the subjec…
"What is it like to be a rock" => no thing satisfies that answer => a rock does not have unconscious mental states How do you know that? Philosophically, of course. I mean sure you can’t cut a rock open and see any mental states. But you can no more cut a human open and see mental states either. Now I am no way suggesting that you don’t have a model for ascribing mental states to humans. Or dogs. Or LLM’s. Just that…
Well you don't, and my reading of the article was that Nagle also recognized that it was basically an assumption which he granted to bats specifically so as to have a concrete example (one which was suitably unobjectionable, seems like he thought bats 'obviously' had some level of consciousness). The actual utility of this definition is not, as far as my understanding goes, to demarcate between what is and what is not conscious. It seems more like he's using it to establish a sort of "proof-by-contradiction" against the proposal that consciousness admits a totally materialistic description. Something like:
(1) If you say that A is conscious, then you also must say that A has subjective self-experience (which is my understanding of the point of the whole "what it is to be like" thing)
(2) Any complete description/account of the consciousness of A must contain a description of the subjective self-experience of A because of (1)
(3) Subjective self-experience cannot be explained in purely materialistic/universal terms, because it's subjective (so basically by definition)
=> Consciousness cannot be fully described in a materialistic framework, because of the contradiction between (2) and (3)
> Just that all models, however useful are still models
Totally agree with this, I think you're just misunderstanding the specific utility of this model (which is this specific argument about what can be described using human language). My example with the rock was kind of a specific response to OP illustrate how I understood the whole "what it is to be like" thing to be equivalent to (1). If I'd had a bit more forethought I probably would have made those arrows in the line you've quoted bidirectional.
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Uhgh "slop" is ok but "enshittification" was lame from the start.
Not only is it a terrible term, but it describes a concept that isn’t really worthy of having its own term. It’s really just a way of saying “people will make things worse over time”
Mostly people make things better over time. My bed, my shower, my car are all better than I could reasonably have bought 50 years ago. But the peculiarities of software network effects - or of what venture capitalists believe about software network effects - mean that people should give things away below cost while continuing to make them better, and then one day switch to selling them for a profit and making them worse, while they seemingly could change nothing and not make them worse.
That's a particular phenomenon worthy of a name and the only problem with "enshittification" is that it's been co-opted to mean making things worse in general.
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Uhgh "slop" is ok but "enshittification" was lame from the start.
Not only is it a terrible term, but it describes a concept that isn’t really worthy of having its own term. It’s really just a way of saying “people will make things worse over time”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“The Feeling of What Happens” by Antonio D’Amasio, a book by a neuroscientist some years ago [0], does an excellent job of building a framework for conscious sensation from the parts, as I recall, constructing a theory of “mind maps” from various nervous system structures that impressed me with a sense that I could afterwards understand them. [0] https://www.labyrinthbooks.com/the-feeling-of-what-happens/
As a radical materialist, the problem with ordinary materialism is that it boils down to dualism because some types matter (e.g. the human nervous system) give rise to consciousness and other types of matter (e.g. human bones) do not. Ordinary materialism is mind-body/soul-substance subjectivity with a hat and lipstick.
I’d bet bats would enjoy marrow too if they could.
EDIT: removed LLM irrelevancy, improved formatting
Bluey: "Yeah!"
Bandit: "How is it?"
Bluey: "It's great! You get to eat a lot of fruit!"
Somebody used this paper to make the term batfished, which they defined as being fooled into ascribing subjectivity to a non-sentient actor (i.e. an AI). https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2025/06/30/what-is-it-like...
Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" assumes that bats are conscious, and that the question of what is the subjective experience of being a bat (e.g. what does the sense of echolocation feel like) is therefore a meaningful question to ask. The author inventing "batfished" also believes bats to be conscious, so it seems a very poorly conceived word, and anyways unnecessary since anthropomorphize works just fine... "…
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> it's still possible to believe chatgpt is unconscious for the same reason a game of tetris is unconscious. Certainly. I just didn't know where you stood on the question. In Nagel's terms, there is not something it is like to be a game of Tetris. A game of Tetris doesn't have experiences. "Something it is like" is an attempt to characterize the aspect of consciousness that's proved most difficult to explain - what C…
There is no distinction: the idea that there is a distinction rests on a linguistic confusion. The sentence "something it is like to be a bat" tries, as it were, to split the concept of "being a bat" in two, then makes us wonder about the difference between the two halves. I reject that we have to answer for any such difference, when we can show that the two halves are actually the same thing. It's a grammatical tric…
If you claim there's no distinction, then in terms of the meaning Nagel is trying to convey, you're claiming there's no distinction that sets you apart from a game of Tetris in terms of consciousness.
That's where my first reply to you was coming from: if you believe the distinction Nagel is trying to convey doesn't exist, that's tantamount to saying that consciousness as a real phenomenon doesn't exist - the eliminativist position - or something along those lines.
If you do believe consciousness exists, then you're simply arguing with the way Nagel is choosing to characterize it. I asked how you would describe it, but you haven't tried to address that.
It's not like anything, a bat has no sense of self or personal history, it operates on instinct without a personal, reflective self. A bat having consciousness is as relevant as whether a sonar does.
I think we would call this "without ego" and not "without consciousness". I think it's totally possible to be conscious without ego. And perhaps bats do have an ego however small - some may be more greedy than others, etc.