Is true consciousness even provable? No, really, is it?
Maybe I am giving something away, but why wouldnât we?
Does anyone else think hoisting a sixty pound board eight and a half feet in the air, in a tight maneuver, without a ladder or anyone else is risky?
Maybe @shaddack has some work-saving recommendations? Probably involving silver azide?
Can I admit I just did it, and literally ripped my shirt off and howled?
Now isnât the 18.75" to 19.25" width board I need to cut next gonna be a bigger pain?
(Shirtless and sweating, oh yeah (oh yeah?))
Oh, did you know sharpening a pencil with a sawzall is a waste of time?
Sawzall for the big jobs, Dremel for the little jobs?
Donât you have a pen knife?
Isnât that a good question and one that has not remotely been decided despite it hovering around the edges of the production of knowledge for centuries? Am I a dummy for not knowing the answer? As I suggest to @miasm, arenât we hamstrung in answering those questions by existing in these damnable fragile, narrow, limited, and frustrating things known as physical bodies? But do we even think about these problematics if we were uploaded into some computer which held all knowledge and would we lose something of ourselves in the process?
Boy, didnât I have some tasty beer with todayâs lunch?
Holy crap, did I just install a ceiling by myself???
Nobody else was gonna do it, right?
Doesnât that problem lie at the heart of the argument concerning prosthetic neurones being currently developed, can you really say itâs entirely you if that you is dependant upon prostheses?
For sure, doesnât my take hinge upon the assumption that prosthetic neurones can potentially be just as good at their jobs as current biological neurones? Heck, canât we can go further and ask if engineering of totally biological neurones, even within the context of DNA manipulation prior to the growth of an actual bodily vehicle, could be said to constitute a substrate which generates ârealâ consciousness? Is any manipulation of our neural phenotype consistent with the idea of human consciousness?
I think you are invoking the concept of naive (false) consciousness, toy-models of the mind and such and if so, I agree wholeheartedly⌠are there even many really conscious individuals currently alive? Did they all have to sit on top of a mountain for 30 years to invoke such a state?
Hmm, unless youâre positing a collective unconscious as an intrinsic part of consciousness as we currently understand it, might not the downloading of information from the past (our present) into a physical, neural substrate and accompanying (cloned?) body be said to be automatically taking part in such a collective by sheer fact of its existence? There would, I guess have to be some evidence of information transmission from mind to mind, or perhaps the individual mind is really only referring to information embedded within itâs own structure?
But donât I think thatâs an aside to the main point of continuation of conscious process, through time, just with an apparent physical and temporal dislocation?
I mean, who cares what itâs for? And even if consciousness is for something, havenât we evolved past the point where we can choose to no longer exist for that thing?
Didnât quite grasp what you mean there, why wouldnât there be any individual subjectivity if all that is really happening is that neural patterns are replicated in another, physically disconnected (personal) substrate?
More importantly, did the collective unconsious help you do so, or did you do so as an individual?
If one spirit screams into the abyss, and there is no echo, was there ever a sound?
Think Iâm gonna go to church tomorrow with Mrs. slybevel. Anything yâall want me to tell Jebus?
(ETA - You wouldnât believe this cannibal cult sheâs in. Every week they eat the flesh and blood of their god!)
Shouldnât he already know whatever Iâd have to say?
Isnât it a quasi-static problem? Wouldnât converting it into a dynamic one be rather counterproductive?
Why should it matter anyway? Isnât there always a time when the philosophers should get shot and the bloody thing rolled into production?
I just finished reading âThe Long Earthâ by Pratchett and Baxter and boy donât they think so?
#Spoilers
One character is born then temporarily left on an alternate earth where he is literally the only human in the universe and doesnât he get imprinted with a very different appreciation for âweatherâ from the collective human unconscious?
What if we just ordered pizza for the philosophers and stole the files and forged their signatures and move the thing along?
(Iâm just sayingâŚmaybe theyâre still useful?)
Arenât we coming at this problem from two angles, but isnât their intersection interesting to consider?
Isnât that a great question that I have no clear answer to? Doesnât that go back to the long term debate about the very nature of consciousness in the first place? Is there much difference between thinking these issues of consciousness itself through with words and ideas or with religion much different than doing so through ideas such as the singularity that the futurists propose, where our consciousnesses are all put into some machine (or as you say, prosethic neurone), disconnected from the workings of our biology?
Isnât to be human to be conscious in the first place, to be subject to a notion that we are ourselves, seated within these meat machines, which limits us? Isnât this what I mean by subjectivity in history, that we can not fully transcend our historical moment or our physical bodies enough to join some collective unconscious (whether religiously or technologically constructed), because then we lose what makes us human in the first place, or very subjectivity?
Donât I mean that are we altered into something else by going through technological rather than biological processes, though donât I hope to disconnect this from any moral consideration, either way? But then again, is that my own subjectivity talking?
Am I making any sense, people?