fae @fae@witches.town

mathematicians and programmers do this, musicians and artists do this, at this point i'm extrapolating that basically everyone does it and how can we get them to stop

it's weird how in virtually every field, when an expert has strong opinions about a skill whose absence means a student will never succeed, it's always something they themselves are unusually good at

like what a coincidence, right?

@shoofle *offers hugs*

@shoofle alternate reply:

how about out

you could make that with me

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

@kitsch i don't know you that well but you seem nice, i hope things are ok <3

@shoofle have you heard the good news about triangles

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

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

@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

@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.

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

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

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

@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)

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

@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 @starkatt THANK YOU

@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

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