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.

@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"

@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