i don’t know what consciousness is and i don’t care
Conversation
🥺 do you care about other parts of physics / nature?
2
21
sure, it just doesn’t particularly matter to me which parts are more or less conscious
4
15
On its face, this position is genuinely baffling. Consciousness is arguable the thing that matters most, as its presence or absence almost exclusively drives our ethics and morality. If an AI is conscious, we probably shouldn’t torture it.
2
24
I’m struggling to empathize with a view that’s essentially yes I care about physics just not the part that is the sole base of ethics and morality and feeling
2
22
this is the part i think is deeply confused. i don't think consciousness has anything to do with the basis of ethics and morality and feeling
4
12
do you think that any of the following have anything to do with the basis of ethics?
pain
suffering
desire
-maybe- consciousness doesn't have anything to do with those things, but it's an open question
2
9
yeah sure. i'm not convinced consciousness has much to do with any of these things, except maybe suffering
2
5
does this change if you switch out consciousness for qualia? Eg studying the qualia of desire and it’s causes (tanha etc) and how to alleviate it
2
8
the concept of qualia feels confused to me in the same way that consciousness does. i don't think you can know that anything in the universe experiences qualia except you so it doesn't make any sense to me to use whether *other things* experience qualia as a foundation for ethics
that comes down to how you know anything, and epistemology. I don’t think you can know anything for sure, including that you’ve experienced anything in the past. Best you can do is find good explanations. It’s hard to explain why this current frame exists w/o disproving solipsism
2
1
16
by the time you’re deciding to discount consciousness you’ve already implicitly decided to know tons of things, that’s way past just directly seeing this frame of experience. You had to use some sort of implicit epistemology to decide those things too, it’s not different in kind
1
16
Show replies
Wrote a short thread, and I criticize "consciousness" and "qualia" as they're typically used in a similar way
Quote Tweet
The problem with the way "consciousness" tends to be used is that it takes the manner in which beings show themselves, and turns this into an object, and then places this object in the mind, and forces then into relation to ourselves.
Show this thread
1
1
i don't totally follow but this roughly feels right. here's a thought this thread produces and you can tell me if it has anything to do with what you're trying to say: let's say i'm looking at a baby and it's doing something cute and i'm like "yeah i would die for this baby"
1
1
Show replies
do you experience qualia? I ask because at least a subset of the qualia (the ones that are "in my consciousness") are completely obvious to me, don't get why that wouldn't extend futher.
I used to think that way. But then figured out that mindmelding and phenomenal puzzles combined could solve the problem of other minds. The solution is non-trivial, but I believe it works.
See:
2
3
Show replies
Why would you care about ethics or morality if not for people experiencing and suffering
1
You think that you are the only person experiencing consciousness even though others report the same qualities, emotions, sensations as you do (by coincidence?) In that case nothing exists unless you experience it yourself – so no one exists but you (by that philosophy)
