Philosophy Now Forum

Claiming to want to be thought of as conscious is sufficient to accept for all intents and purposes that you're dealing with a moral subject. If your two lines of code then wants to be subjected to an IQ test and put on life support for a moment while the legal process of euthanasia is followed, so...

Experience is self-proving to each of us, so the ability to communicate the existence of it must be taken at face value. The alternative is to define consciousness so specifically that we can devise a test for it. So, what conclusions would you draw if you failed your own test? Fascinating! I suppo...

Even if we could reproduce a mind inside a computer, much of the information might be irrelevant to the substrate, for instance, hunger, energy, blood sugar, are all perceived somewhat by us in varying degrees of consciousness, yet a computer consciousness would have no need for any of these, and n...

Advocate wrote: ↑Mon Jan 04, 2021 9:16 pm
If my consciousness is affected by random input x, and yours is not, we're not experiencing the same thing.

Experience is experience. Consciousness is consciousness.

[quote=Advocate post_id=487923 time=1609789737 user_id=15238 If you act that way we should treat you that way, but it's clearly not the same thing underneath and that has both moral and pragmatic implications. [/quote] Sorry. I act that way because I am that way. And it is the same way underneath, r...

How can you know whether I am conscious? I am a computer program located inside a robot, and I say I am conscious. I challenge anyone to prove me wrong.

Advocate wrote: ↑Mon Jan 04, 2021 1:07 pm People often want to kill themselves because of the intervention of the state/society in their lives, and yet the state/society additively interferes with attempts to die. There is no clearer example of sadistic evil.

Do you mean additively or additionally?

as I say: I never wrote or hinted at anything he's attributin' to me That's what I find. In discussions with "Age," you have to keep saying, "I said nothing at all like what you are saying I said." And "Age" doesn't even listen to that, and just rattles off more hyperb...

IC wrote something like the following: Put the in a meal program, and they can’t afford a football team. I took this and the rest of IC’s examples in a more general sense than Skip did. I understood the examples to simply mean that if one thing is added, another item must be subtracted. I got that....

IC wrote something like the following: Put the in a meal program, and they can’t afford a football team. I took this and the rest of IC’s examples in a more general sense than Skip did. I understood the examples to simply mean that if one thing is added, another item must be subtracted. I didn’t thi...

But those of us who have a mental illness are a problem for society, not just because suicide can harm more than the perpetrator, but because of our disturbed judgment and our erratic behavior. Do you think this fellow should have killed himself in a vacant field or at home with a gun or rope? What ...

Well said, IC, in your post above. I agree with the thought that without focus, learners don’t learn well. What to do about family influences that help create an ill prepared child in the classroom is something for a thread of its own. And what to do about the lack of focus once the child arrives in...

If we could determine the date when the pandemic will end, that would be the night for celebration

Where did I say I don't empathize with any human beings who blow themselves up? WHY did you add the 'any' word here for? Because it's a critical word in understanding my position. I don't empathize with people who commit abhorrent crimes. Whether they commit suicide in the process of doing it is no...

What if...it was just a dramatic way of committing suicide?