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.

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.

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] nifty 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] nifty 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.

Again, philosophy is only tangentially related to proof.

Edit: I disagree with this again based on previously stated reasons. Philosophy has never been without reason or logic :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] nifty 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.

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

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

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.