People like to ask "what makes you think that x is conscious?"

My reply is: "what makes you think that *you* are?"

@starkatt ‪...what do they say?‬

@fae this is, so far, only a hypothetical conversation :p

@starkatt that is a shame, the subjective experience of consciousness is one of my favorite metaphysical conundrums 😜

@starkatt most of the time it's hard to even convey to ppl why i consider it a conundrum :-P

@fae What do you mean?

@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)