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1·9 months agodeleted by creator
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1·9 months agoI’d still consider it but […] I’ll never buy one.
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You can make objective statements about things we can’t measure.
Sure, but you should have a reason ito believe it exists to begin with. Otherwise your making statements about nothing.
Also you can’t measure self-awareness.
There have been tests of self-awareness. Ranging from seeing if a species will try to get something off of itself viewable only through a mirror (proving some sense of self), to measuring brain changes when someone thinks about something.
I have a feeling you mean something else besides “awareness of ones self” when you say self-awareness, though. Awareness is within our understanding, and pointing that inwards doesn’t raise any new mysteries.
Living being, just like machines, can have information related from internals, and either one can process that information.
This all rests on the assumptions that avoiding suffering is objectively the ideal, and I disagree on that.
I’d like to see less suffering, but I don’t confuse my own values with objective values.
Many people think pain is necessary for virtue, so that right there would dispell pain as the objective measure.
Many others have some biased view on it. That it should only be for their clan/nation/species that this applies.
Even if all of humanity agreed reducing pain was the #1 goal, that wouldn’t mean it had any objective value outside that society. An uncaring universe with a lifeform that have similar values, is still an uncaring universe.
This is like asking “Who delivers the postman’s mail?”, it may seem like a profound question, but it’s very simple.
People can be aware of millions of things, when it comes to understanding themselves they can model it in the brain with neurons the same way they would think about or model the concept of another creature they saw. Just because they are thinking about themselves doesn’t make it suddenly unique and mysterious.
You may as well be asking how someone could be aware of any random thing in their life. The postman delivers his own mail, nothing complex or enigmatic about it.
If you mean how does a person have conscious awareness of their own thoughts, that’s like treating computers as a mystery: How can my PC’s software display hardware sensory data and react to it? How can my PC display and reason about the code underlying it?
Of course, people don’t get the same feeling of mystery about software that can have this “self-awareness” because the real motivation for these ideas about humans lies in a desire for humans to be special and unique.
There has been research and measurement into consciousness, there are machines that scan the brain, there are published findings about changes observed in the nervous system for various changes in consciousness.
Until you can identify what part of consciousness can’t be measured, how can you say consciousness can’t be measured?
Yes, it’s a physical process where a creature reacts to unwanted physical stimuli.
There’s even ongoing research into objectively measuring pain: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30700064/
We can’t measure it, because what you are talking about doesn’t exist.
Once you point to a part that does exist, it immediately becomes something that we can understand and measure.
The part that can’t be measured is the part people erroneously assume exists because they have a gut feeling it does. Not because of any real evidence.
We might as well philosophize about the ramblings of the delusional, because they sense something is real, but cannot provide it to the rest of us.
Generally in the latter case, people understand the error in that. In the former, realizing “consciousness” is just a useful hallucination that helps humans reflect on their own thought process doesn’t come so easy.
In other words “consciousness” is as emergent as the imaginary friend of someone who’s lost touch with reality.
Why are you trying to measure something, when you have no evidence for it existing to begin with?
Anything you could point to as objective morality would be explainable as a relative preference by some group.
Putting it into some objective context is something religions do, on faith.
You can’t solve a mystery you can’t properly identify to begin with.
People feel like something more than physical is going on. Rather than see it as a natural consequence of abstract thinking and self-reflection, they jump to the conclusion that this sense is supernatural.
Science isn’t in the business of examining vague hunches. The first step to getting an answer is deciding what there is to explain. Our current theories on the brain are compatable with people thinking about their own thoughts, and even having emotional reactions to that process.
Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing contradicting the scientific worldview has happened. So what is there to explain?
6·9 months ago
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