I think defining consciousness is a bit of a tough problem. I am not sure hard-disks or viruses qualify, I suspect fish might, but it's very hard to prove that. When harddrives or viruses start passing Turing tests, then I'll be ready to consider it.
-
-
I think I'm mostly ok with that last one too. It seems closer to correct (or satisfying to my aesthetics anyway) than the other three. I don't want to say _everything_ is conscious though. Figuring out what the varieties of consciousness are is a fun pursuit.
-
human-style consciousness is already diverse, but then we have to account for stars, fish, starfish, aliens, starfish aliens, hard drives, and the hard drives of starfish aliens.
-
I remember, as a kid, balking at a Frank Herbert story in which stars were conscious.
-
thinking about the consciousness of things that live at vastly different time scales than humans is difficult. fungi and plants are already hard to accept, but with stars you're stretching it out to billions of times longer time scale than anything human-like.
-
for plants a day is a breath and a year is a day. what is a star's breath?
-
the substrate of stellar consciousness is millions of nuclear fusion reactions per second so they have spectacular processing power, they don't notice us because we're so slow
- 5 more replies
New conversation -
-
-
and that thing has free will if it is not constrained in its decisions by hostile force. You can be entirely predictable and still be exercising free will, and many people are/do.
-
Tweet unavailable
-
I don't think it's a clumsy antonym: I think most people know full well what they mean by the term. It's only philosophers who get confused.
-
Getting confused by the obvious is a good definition of philosophy
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
well I think "free will is an illusion" is only a conclusion that you can come to if you've got a faulty definition of free will. Even if consciousness is part of the issue (and maybe it's not) we do all know there is at least 1 conscious thing, (at least while we're awake)...
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.