Definitely not the same as being asleep!

Same, creeped me the fuck out to be honest and was super scary, like we know it intellectually i guess but to actually “experience” it was so strange. Did not abate my fear of death though.

Not how sleeping works, but then again this is the philosophy subreddit so throwing out mindless nonsense is the norm.

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It seems to a feature of our universe. Which is why Chalmers invokes it in his meta-problem paper as the debunking argument for illusionism. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://philpapers.org/archive/CHATMO-32.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwj9naKTzeP7AhVRAxAIHQxnBTsQFnoECBsQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1dBPho_aISdjlJadD9LpMq

The point is simply that so far we have not been able to find what-its-likeness in the description of the universe. And I fact I think it's not there. Neural correlates - sure. Or course. But just like I would never ever infer that food tastes like something if it were tasteless to me until I actually would acquire the ability to taste..so too we would never infer phenomenal consciousness or subjective experience without actually experiencing it. That seems quite a significant point and I argue on my point why. Neither a language game nor useless.

You can of course argue that you need to have consciousness to know anything at all, but that's definitely not a given nor obvious. There could be a nonsentient entity processing things without any inner experience, and even with an exhaustive description of the universe it would still remain clueless that there is something like subjective experience. That seems rather significant.

It's why Chalmers also invented the p-zombie... to highlight this gap. However I'd prefer not to get into argumentd about that and conceivability as that's another rabbit hole.

Sounds like my ketamine days

What I like about that quote is rarely does the person playing it care if it is actually true.

No, this is the sort of situation that prompted the Jonathon Swift quote >“You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place.”

> If it differs wrt the fact that mathematics/logic are indifferent to substantive questions of fact or value, then I'm afraid to say that your model is incorrect on this point.

I'm thinking along these lines: "Perhaps certain conditions can be set and then things will resolve on their own."

You seem to be appealing to flawless mathematical evaluation, whereas I am referring to the behavior of the illogical walking biological neural networks we refer to as humans.

> No doubt, but once again that doesn't contradict what I said

I believe it does to some degree because you are making statements of fact, but you may not be able to care if your facts are actually correct. In a sense, this is the very exploit that my theory depends upon.

Is this not just a super obvious tautology?

You cant know of consciousness without being conscious.... yeah you cant know anything without it.

It seems like a bit of a mistake to think understanding consciousness requires a metaphysical relation to it specifically. And while its is correct, it is akin to a correlation, causation mistake. You are arguing: you need to have X to understand and know X, so we might be missing Y because we dont have Y. While it is true that we cant know X without X, its a mistake to think there is a special relation between X and knowing X. Rather it's simply X is a requirement to understand or know anything in the first place. So obviously to understand X we need X, but there is no key relation between the two, you need X to understand. Having X has just as much of a relationship in understand X, as it does A,B,C,D,E, etc...

The statement imo is obviously true, but the whole point is wrong because the more parsimonious statement is simply: "you can't know of consciousness without being conscious."

You can get into weird useless arguments about how you prefer to define knowing or consciousness, but it's pretty all useless talking past each other and language games at that point. But even if you define knowing, in a way something unconscious like a computer can know, you can simply make the same argument for anything to say something unconscious can know consciousness. And again its simply argument of definitions. In both situations leaving out consciousness is more parsimonious.

Every time I try to rationalize death I hit a wall where the rationalization process can't go further.

What scares us from death is thinking that we would still have some form of consciousness where we would regret everything that was wrong with our lives, like saying "all my life struggles and efforts to be happy just to end up like this"? When we learn that someone has died you think that; a friend of yours that was studying and working really hard to have a good life in future years suddenly stops living, you see all that wasted potential and it scares you that the same thing can happen to you.

But surely in practice that won't happen, you die and that's it, no regrets. The problem is we can't shake off that feeling by rationalizing it, or at least I can't, and the fear will always be there.

Right, that does pose an additional issue for the non-sentient hypothetical being. However, it doesn't really break the argument. We can reduce it for example to people who are born without certain senses - for example no eyesight. These people just can't know what it is like to see (even though some scientific evidence shows the visual cortex does engage in some ways for these people) - so in general we know that without being acquainted with what-its-likeness.. you simply can't know of it.

I was not ready

Edit: removed thank you

>Perhaps it is, perhaps it is not

No, its definitely not. Neither mathematics nor logic can tell us the answer to any substantive question of fact or value. It can never tell you whether you should be a consequentialist or not. It can't tell you whether you should steal, murder, or even to swipe the last piece of pizza. Logic and mathematics can tell you all about logical or mathematical questions... but nothing substantive about ethics or moral philosophy. Logic and mathematics only become relevant once you've got that part figured out.

>In the virtual model within your mind that you are examining - I have a virtual model that is different than yours

If it differs wrt the fact that mathematics/logic are indifferent to substantive questions of fact or value, then I'm afraid to say that your model is incorrect on this point.

>There are many tricky parts - some known, some not, some "known" incorrectly, etc.

No doubt, but once again that doesn't contradict what I said: I'm saying that the ways in which mathematics/logic is useful is a less tricky matter than what moral philosophy, ethical framework, or particular moral values/judgments are right or correct or should be adopted in the first place. Once you have answered the latter question, the answer to the former follows fairly easily (in most instances, at any rate).

Growth, forest fires produce they do* I'm convinced Yoda just speaks English in Spanish format haha

Yeah but not for us. We are born too early to experience that so by the time technology gets there we’ll be nothing but soil and worm poop.

Maybe in 200 years, people will live forever in cyborg bodies with multiple backups in case of being murdered and there will be no sicknesses or anything anymore. But we just missed that train

The after life is like the customer service robots still idling at the abandoned fairground like in ”Detroit become human”

Look up "Roko's Basilisk", but only if you're ready for a bit of existential dread

>its not a problem we can solve.

Yet.

Which is why we need to continue to focus on the problem.

> But then you can't resolve a moral problem or dilemma, the topic of this thread.

"Perhaps certain conditions can be set and then things will resolve on their own."

Tangential topics often occur in threads, I thought this approach might be interesting to some.

> When it comes to reasoning or logic, you can't get out more than you put in

"Each agent in the system has onboard cognition"

> if you want to come to a conclusion involving a moral judgment or moral obligation/prohibition, you need premises laying down the necessary moral presuppositions for the conclusion to follow.

"agents are affected by their environment, their knowledge/belief, and the knowledge/belief of other agents in the system. Normalizing beliefs (ideally: a net decrease in delusion, but perhaps not even necessarily) could change things for the better (or the worse, to be fair)."

> And mathematics or logic is of no avail here.

Perhaps it is, perhaps it is not.

> Sure, and none of that is objectionable; but the OP is talking about using mathematics or logic to solve moral problems, and my point is simply that the point where mathematics or logic are useful is after the hard part has already been done, i.e. determining what sort of moral framework or what sorts of moral presuppositions are right or correct.

In the virtual model within your mind that you are examining - I have a virtual model that is different than yours (this is one non-trivial but often overlooked detail that I would be sure to mention front and centre in all discussions).

> Like, if you're a utilitarian you can use simple arithmetic in many situations to decide what course of action maximizes happiness and minimizes unhappiness....

To estimate what course of action...

> ...but the tricky part is determining whether one should be a utilitarian or not in the first place.

There are many tricky parts - some known, some not, some "known" incorrectly, etc.

I think it may be useful for humans to be a bit more experimental in our approaches, it seems to me that we are in a bit of a rut in many places.

One might subscribe to the notion that "you" can't "know" at all unless you're conscious.

>These aren't separate things. They are just different ways to describe the same thing. Pain is neural activity.

That doesn't have any bearing on my point, though. Neural activity doesn't inform the observer that it feels like anything at all.

Okay, but I am not sure I follow what your argument is. That we can in principle detect consciousness without invoking consciousness? As in, Chalmers' debunking argument in his meta-problem paper?

>Correct.

But then you can't resolve a moral problem or dilemma, the topic of this thread. When it comes to reasoning or logic, you can't get out more than you put in: if you want to come to a conclusion involving a moral judgment or moral obligation/prohibition, you need premises laying down the necessary moral presuppositions for the conclusion to follow. And mathematics or logic is of no avail here.

>Perhaps certain conditions can be set and then things will resolve on their own. Each agent in the system has onboard cognition, and agents are affected by their environment, their knowledge/belief, and the knowledge/belief of other agents in the system. Normalizing beliefs (ideally: a net decrease in delusion, but perhaps not even necessarily) could change things for the better (or the worse, to be fair).

Sure, and none of that is objectionable; but the OP is talking about using mathematics or logic to solve moral problems, and my point is simply that the point where mathematics or logic are useful is after the hard part has already been done, i.e. determining what sort of moral framework or what sorts of moral presuppositions are right or correct.

Like, if you're a utilitarian you can use simple arithmetic in many situations to decide what course of action maximizes happiness and minimizes unhappiness, but the tricky part is determining whether one should be a utilitarian or not in the first place.

>This argument rests on consciousness as a phenomenon only being knowable through being itself – that it cannot be inferred through other means. That if a non-sentient robot, would observe and communicate with us, be able to hold all key facts about us and our behavior in its cognitive system, it would never in principle be able to guess the existence of consciousness.

I disagree with this premise.

>That when we scream in pain there are not just observable signals that travel from A to B in our body triggering behaviors, but that we feel something when this happens

These aren't separate things. They are just different ways to describe the same thing. Pain is neural activity.