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.

@fae @starkatt OH SAME

@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

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

@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.