this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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Never heard of the "universe started Thursday" theory?
Essentially, there is no proof that the universe didn't start last Thursday. All of your memories, your experiences, your tangible progress, could be planted and you would never know.
So how do you know you are "you" as you think you are, or if you're just a week old construct that believes you are "you"?
Also, I think that the whole "we can't be certain we are the same person who wakes up every morning" is based on the ship of theseus concept they were building on.
You wouldn't consider yourself the exact same person you were when you were 5 for obvious reasons. So it stands to reason that that change happened at some point. How would you know that you did not change over night? And if you did, are you the same person as yesterday? And if you answer yes, where's the line? Are you the same person as last year? 5 years ago? Obviously not, so how can you know that that caliber of change hasn't happened to you in a night, or that any amount of change makes you someone else?
Also, they could be referring to the broken consciousness theory, where consciousness is destroyed when you fall asleep, created when you wake, and dreams are an illusion.
In that scenario, if your stream of consciousness actually is broken, can you say you are the same person as yesterday? If the breaking of consciousness doesn't matter in that question, would a perfect copy of you with all of your memories also be you? Or not, because you can't experience their perspective?
I think the break here is whether or not you can define consciousness as "you". For your supposition to be true, the answer would necessarily have to be no, as you said you can prove that you are yourself in many other ways.
But without a point of perspective experiencing the universe, what are we?
Ah rationalism, my mind blocks out unpleasant things all the time. There’s no proof the Universe wasn’t farted out by God. In this case, I guess I’d treat it as any other fantastical statement: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I think people who liken consciousness to a collection of properties make the same mistake as people attributing language comprehension as a property of consciousness. You cannot put discrete elements together and call something a ship any more than you can put discrete elements together and call it conscious. A translation app can see and translate images from one language to another, but the app is not conscious.
Regarding the changes a conscious being experiences over time: you can change on a chemical level (as one does over time), you can change on a genetic level (this also happens for any living thing over time), and you can change over an organism level, but you remain the same person (even after you get up from sleeping) because you maintain some internally directed sense of self. Internal self-direction is a key property of consciousness.
Ah, so this conversation doesn't matter. You made up your mind even before you even asked for explanation.
By design, philosophical concepts neither require nor can produce proof. If they could, they literally wouldn't be philosophy. If your idea of arguing how "you" exists includes the line of reasoning that you need proof, then the truth to you is that "you" don't exist, because you cannot prove your consciousness to someone else either. Just the same as I cannot empirically prove my consciousness to you. You are an amalgamation of chemicals and genetics, as you said.
So really, one taking your stance doesn't have the conversational authority to even ask what proof is there. The hard evidence is just chemical reactions and genetics all the way down.
In any case, all three of the concepts I listed are not my ideas. They are debated topics, some for literally centuries, in the philosophical world. If you suppose yourself better than the likes of Plato or Socrates because you think you can label a fundamental aspect of the universe as a "mistake" people make when they think about it, then there's really no honest way you can even approach theories like those without immediately discrediting them.
I guess have fun with that. But for me, there's no point in contemplating with someone who supposes that proof precedes basic concepts of philosophy in a question inherently about philosophy.
Hmm, well-reasoned thought experiments apply their logic in a way that provides a structural basis for maintaining their arguments, which serves as the proof for the thought experiment.
As a conscious being I prove my existence by engaging with external stimuli (like other people) while maintaining an internally motivated and directed sense of self for my self-propagation. Absent any need for self-propagation and being only something that reacts or responds, l would be a humble bot. An amalgamation of chemicals and genetics can react and respond, but it’s not necessarily motivated for self propagation.
Viruses are interesting in that they behave like self propagating organisms, but at an indv. level they lack the capacity for adjusting their responses strategically to external stimuli. That is, the adaptive response for virii is left up to random genetics (same as for bacteria), which precludes consciousness.
I cannot speak to you being a conscious being in case you’re a bot. Bots can pass the Turing test, but passing the Turing test doesn’t necessarily guarantee consciousness.
All this to say, feel free to share your thoughts. I am not close minded, even if I am strongly biased towards some ideas vs others. Arguments should be judged based on their strength, I think.
Evidenced-based discussion is only tangentially related to philosophy. There's no point in sharing my thoughts if the crux of your counterpoint essentially boils down to "prove it or go home"
In the meantime, if I can present three separate, historical philosophical ideas to you and you can shoot them all down with one phrase demanding proof and a supposition that everyone else is just mistaken, you may want to reexamine your idea of an open mind.
You have engaged a philosophical topic with evidence-based expectations. I recognize the futility of continuing this conversation, and so I won't. Making a point and being countered with "maybe you're just wrong" is literally a waste of my time.
I did more than enough to clarify the original person's point. I don't owe you a scientific explanation for that which you refuse to consider.
Later.
I don’t know what you think is happening here, sorry I am confused.
Anyway don’t worry about it! When I say proof, I mean something like this: https://milnepublishing.geneseo.edu/concise-introduction-to-logic/chapter/4-proofs/
Again, philosophy is only tangentially related to proof. You can't examine a theory like the ship of theseus with any of those methods and come out with a conclusive answer. If you could, it wouldn't be a philosophical topic.
You don't understand that, and I'm not going to attempt the impossible to prove it to you. That's why this conversation is meaningless and I don't really wish to continue it.
Have a good night
Okey doke, do as you wish! FYI, though I wasn’t asking for a “proof of the Ship of Theseus”, more about how one derives that you’re not the same conscious entity before and after going to sleep. I think I’ll go do some reading, I am sure someone’s said something somewhere about this.
Realistically, I am just going to look at more meemees and go to sleep.
Edit: I disagree with this again based on previously stated reasons. Philosophy has never been without reason or logic :)
As a conscious being I prove my existence by engaging with external stimuli...
...Bots can pass the Turing test, but passing the Turing test doesn’t necessarily guarantee consciousness.
This is part of the problem. We don't have a consistent definition for consciousness anymore than we have a definition for AGI. (AGI can, by reading the instructions, build flat-packed furniture, or make coffee, but would a bot that could do these things be AGI?)
We assume the people we talk to are conscious, but then they could be Turing complete bots, or a Chinese room, or a p-zombie. You've essentially argued that you cannot demonstrate to us that you are actually conscious, only that you seem so convincingly.
Similarly, if I were to argue that I'm not conscious, but an advanced iteration of an AI program practicing speaking from a private lab in Sacramento California, and in fact, have no life beyond going online and pretending to be a person, you'd have no way of establishing this as true or false.
So appealing to consciousness is useless on account that we can't actually say what it is. Again, we don't have any edge cases of anything that is nearly conscious and appears to be, but isn't, or something that is conscious but only barely. We assume that anything we can engage as human is, often leading to peculiar results like Sophia, the Robot-yet-Saudi-citizen that isn't even convincingly sophisticated.
I'd argue that we want to be more than a material chain reaction, to the point that we're frightened of considering the bare minimums that we would need to be to be convincingly ourselves.
Right, except non digital beings have different modes of interactions with universe. In fact, more than that a key difference is that conscious beings impose themselves on the universe in an effort to self propagate. While we’re just interacting digitally, I cannot ensure anything, but that by itself doesn’t mean anything.
I am not sure of anything, but I dislike reading the same ideas that don’t seem to add up as far as I am concerned shrug
But we do, people in comas for example. They maintain personality and memory after persistent unconscious periods, which differentiates them from both unconscious organisms, and also precludes the reconstruction hypothesis.