Because, thinking the existing of subjective experience
that is any way special is just societal programming that claims that humans are special and important in the universe.
If you step away from the bias, there is no reason to think our consciousness is anything special. Who cares about subjective experience, it all disappears into the void when those chemical reactions stop.
> Because, thinking the existing of subjective experience that is any way special is just societal programming that claims that humans are special and important in the universe.
This has absolutely nothing to do with humans, or even this planet. I have no "bias".
We have trillions of stars in trillions of galaxies.
I was talking about consciousness, zero to do with "societal programming". If you don't want it to be about humans than make it about planet X that is orbiting star Y in galaxy Z that has also evolved conscious beings.
You don't think existing at all as a conscious entity in a vastly enormous, complex and strangely beautiful universe is "any way special"? We'll have to agree to disagree on that one!
Subjective experience can both be something real and also not something special in some magical sense.
If subjective experience were really just an illusion, why would you care about what happens to yourself - hell, why would you even have a concept of 'yourself'?
All he’s saying is that as a subset of the universe, whatever words you want to apply to describe your subjective experience, apply equally to the universe, since you are part of the universe. Not sure what “special” has to do with it
In short, if Universe will exist forever (no matter its heat death, the Boltzmann Brain also works under those conditions), then all configurations of matter (locally) will appear over its "lifetime" infinitely many times.
Consequently, you with your subjective experience and memories could have been created a picosecond ago by "random" motions of matter, without the need for them (ie activities leading to memories) to occur, and without thoughts being previously processed.
As strange, as it sounds, the argument is actually solid, though hard to grasp in the first moment for those who haven't encountered it yet :).
PS: This also means that 'cogito ergo sum' is too strong of a statement. Just saying "something exists" (as in, "why there's something rather than nothing") seems sufficient.
Eh. This seems like a very "Load State" kind of way of looking at things. That doesn't preclude a kind of higher-order logic which generated this state, and from within the state, there would be no way to tell. So time isn't stored sequentially, so what? The illusion of continuous subjective experience is tantamount to it.
If I'm actually a Boltzmann Brain, all my memories are a lie and I just exist for a picosecond, then Boltzmann Brains can experience subjective experiences, so what?
>This also means that 'cogito ergo sum' is too strong of a statement. Just saying "something exists" (as in, "why there's something rather than nothing") seems sufficient.
What's the philosophical difference between your subjective experience of existence and a 90s-style power-on-self-test?
"I am on. I can tell that I am on. I dunno what I think once I am off." Same could be said of man, machine, consciousness, whatever.
What's incomprehensible is the baseless belief that consciousness is some special state of existence unique to balding, violent apes floating around a wet rock, anthropomorphizing all the crap around them just to make themselves feel special.
Huh? Subjective experience is about whether the machine experiences the power-on-self-test, not about what it emits externally. Animals, machines or even rocks might all be conscious, but we simply don't know because it's impossible to ascertain through external means.
>What's incomprehensible is the baseless belief that consciousness is some special state of existence unique to balding, violent apes floating around a wet rock, anthropomorphizing all the crap around them just to make themselves feel special.
> but we simply don't know because it's impossible to ascertain through external means.
Yeah, exactly. We haven't developed a good enough Turing test -- for machines, people, or gods.
> What a ridiculous strawman.
I don't believe is a strawman as much as you think it is. A lot of arguments for consciousness derive from the desire for humans to be special, which is in turn derived from Abrahamic cosmology that places us directly beneath their God.
While I can see where this idea comes from, it seems a bit... self-defeating in a way? At least pragmatically speaking, there's an obvious difference between your point of view and that of the universe: if it's all a big illusion, then presumably there's no point in pursuing anything since it's all inconsequential anyways. And yet here we are clacking on keyboards sending electrons into a mesh of wires and circuitry for some reason. The universe may not care about you, but the implication is that you don't necessarily care about what "it" thinks either, but you definitely care about what you as an individual think.
And in a similarly clinical view of the universe, it doesn't even make sense to anthropomorphize it in the first place, since there's no evidence that the universe has the capability or inclination of empathizing with a human. That leaves us with things that actually are anthropomorphic (other people), and I'd posit that societies are a pretty good example of a complex interaction between many things that are presumably on autorun, and yet are able to work together towards some commonly aligned purpose that has collective meaning on some level higher than just chemicals interacting in particular ways.
It means that consciousness nothing special/supernatural. There is no soul, there is nothing but chemical reactions that manage to create something that is able to claim "I think therefore I am"
The illusion is the fact that we claim that we are able to "experience", but I think that its all just layers of GOTO reactions that create something that think its special. Much like how a program isn't considered conscious, but its very likely its because we haven't dug deeply enough into the layers of shit that is required to make a self-aware computer
We as a species may lack the mental faculties to truly understand the mechanisms by which life evolved the ability to analyze and reason about its surroundings and itself.
We lack the scientific tools to properly differentiate or falsify "consciousness" from any other sufficiently complex phenomenon. We can't tell whether it's an emergent phenomenon arising out of a particular arrangement of energy and matter, or whether it requires some input that we cannot currently observe/measure, or something else entirely. We don't know whether we can create consciousness from its constituent parts, or if it even has constituent parts. We don't know if there's a finite supply of it in the universe, we don't know if it's a dimensional thing, we don't know how it interacts with other forces.
We do know that it appears as though we have much more agency than a rock, yes, but it's a matter of degree how much more when we compare ourselves to other lifeforms, primates, dolphins, elephants, ravens... or other people. We don't know if certain members of our species are "more" or "less" conscious. We don't fully know what happens to consciousness during comas or brain death or dream states or sleep.
It's just an ambiguous term that we apply to the "state of human information processing that we can't really explain". Substitute "ambiguous" for "illusion" if you prefer, but it could also very well be an illusion the same way centrifugal force is a pseudo-force, i.e. the measurement of consciousness depends on some reference frame that we don't know how to use yet.
It's entirely possible that consciousness is NOT an illusion, that it is indeed a special "thing" in the universe, but we can't prove that with the science, language, philosophy, and possibly mental capacity that we currently have. Maybe one day we will. Maybe not. But it's premature to assume we understand anything about consciousness in the philosophical sense.
Why are you concentrating on individual animals, where herd behaviour of them can not be explained by behavior of individual. Same applies to people - there are enough of examples in history of groups of people believing in God and his plan and that belief has led to catastrophic consequences for tribes and even nations...
For all I know nothing really matters - Sun can go Nova or Earth can be hit by a small planet and Life on earth can go extinct.
I don't understand what you're trying to point out. That groups of things can have behaviors that lone individuals don't exhibit? Yes, that is true, whether at the atomic level or the cellular level or the family level or the population level or the species level or the ecosystem level... it's very fascinating, to be sure, but in what way does that prove or disprove any sort of god? It's just the same Watchmaker argument, i.e. that complexity requires a maker, which it arguably does not. Complex behaviors, even flock behaviors, can evolve from the sum of its constituent parts. A pinball machine with eight balls in play will react very different from one with a single ball or no balls, but nobody accuses the pinball machine of being sentient (or if they did, I'd really like to play that machine).
> For all I know nothing really matters - Sun can go Nova or Earth can be hit by a small planet and Life on earth can go extinct.
Yes, and? I wouldn't worry about it too much... you'll likely die from something far more banal, like plain old climate-change-driven political instability, North Korea, the next anti-vax movement, etc.
Hell of a leap. I subscribe to the notion the consciousness is a illusion via chemical whatever and the universe doesn't give a damn anyway.