@starkatt a descriptive specification of the universe gives a ~satisfying explanation for the origin of living beings that behave as though they are conscious and even describe themselves that way, but i get hung up on the gap between that and the actual subjective experience. the external phenomenon is ~explainable but i find myself unable to fully rationalize the subjective sensation.

@starkatt this tension makes me quite curious about people's answers to "what makes you think you're conscious" ^,^

@starkatt i think this is related to the chinese room argument except that when i read about that i found the reasoning both unpersuasive and kind of infuriating

@fae Unpersuasive in which direction?

@starkatt it fails to convince me that consciousness, insofar as it exists, cannot be experienced by a machine

(it also seems so premised on a mishmash of assumptions and question-begging that it's hard for me to even extract the core argument, so i may be missing something :-P)

@fae Oh, I have absolutely no reason to think that consciousness can't be experienced by a machine!

@starkatt no i know, i don't think we're disagreeing about anything in particular right now ^^

@fae @starkatt my take on the chinese room experiment is that the structure of the room has the knowledge and understanding. just like the cells in our brains don't understand shit, they're just operating the system that does

@shoofle Yep :)

@fae @starkatt OH SAME

@shoofle @starkatt THANK YOU

@starkatt @shoofle the most common reaction i get isn't even disagreement, it's just like... something between blank puzzlement and "so what's the problem?" ^,^

@shoofle so what makes you think you're conscious? ^,^

@fae there seems to be some evidence in that i perceive a self and perception, but all in all i prefer to operate under the assumption that consciousness DOESN'T exist tbh

@fae at least when i'm trying to apply rigor!

@shoofle i mean -- fair, but in that case what do you do with subjective sensation? 😜

@fae i'm kinda wary about it sometimes but generally i take it as a given that consciousness exists in some sense going about my day-to-day; it's basically just my axiom of choice

@shoofle (fwiw i go the other direction -- given apparent contradiction between the existence of objective and subjective i choose to doubt the former :-P)

@fae i think i drift back and forth from day to day; i guess i feel like they're just two things that both exist or neither exist and what does it really mean for a thing to "exist" in the first place tbh

@shoofle well that's a whole rabbit hole ^,^ i dunno, leaving aside the question of whether ANYTHING is real, the dominant de facto interpretation seems to be that, say, "gravity" is real in a tangible sense that "consciousness" is not.

@fae yeah, i guess that my response to that dilemma is always that like, everyone seems to experience gravity definitely the same way and i don't trust the reports of consciousness the same way

which i suppose does mean it still comes back to resting on subjective reality

and that's why i don't trust any of them to be real

@shoofle everyone experiences it the same way, but that wasn't apparent until relatively recently when we learned how to quantify it

same with temperature, which is as absolute an objective invariant as anything we know of, but was historically thought to be too intrinsically subjective to quantify

@fae yeah; shrug! mostly i try not to concern myself with whether reality is Real or not and i operate by trusted heuristics instead of trying to do everything from first principles

@shoofle i mean, sameish, cause what else can you do? ^,^ but that particular dilemma nags at me

@fae i think i try to treat them as different tools that are useful in different situations, and that's how i resolve the "conflict"

@fae or something. idk. the whole existence thing sure is a fucked up business eh?

@shoofle i prefer to invent elaborate religions centered around pseudoscientific mysticism XD

@fae power move!

@shoofle have you heard the good news about triangles

@fae i always have time for triangles

@fae (incidentally i wanted to mention that i really would love to like make something with you and the reason i haven't taken the initiative on something like that is that my brain has been in open revolt lately)

@shoofle i completely understand and the feeling is mutual :)

@shoofle alternate reply:

how about out

you could make that with me

@fae that sounds like a fruitful kinda collaboration