All truth is clearly desireable, males in particular love to know tons of useless facts, and can seem to never get enough of them. You already agree in suggesting a truth that you believe to be of no consequence, suggesting by exclusion the realm of truth that is of consequence.

Happiness is play, art, pretend, imagination, fun times with good friends, family, and even strangers -- but life is serious. and seriousness is more important than happiness.

I don't know what you mean by the representational thing, sounds like representational realism as a theory of consciousness, and if so then you just blew the representation I have of my mind! I don't see how they're related... but isn't it the case that a digital camera represents photos as digits in a storage drive? Are digital cameras conscious?

I think the experience of qualia is directly related to consciousness, as in, consciousness is a necessary prerequisite for qualia.

However, Hume argued that we are qualia - the self is a conglomeration of sensory inputs. I have to ask what experiences these sensory inputs, though. For if there is nothing to experience these inputs, they aren't qualia, they are just electrical impulses. — darthbarracuda

That is oddly worded, the whole "sensory input" thing, sounds as if we're sitting in a dark room sending out outputs, and receiving inputs via our organs, and thus interacting with the world.

I do think that qualia is a necessary prerequisite for consciousness, but I'm not sure of the inverse. It isn't clear to me that some animals that definitely have sense are conscious, though I do believe that everything that is conscious has sense.

I don't think that feelings, positive or negative are worth pursuing. I know a religious person, they like to have big inspirational conversations with people, where they use lots of words and ideas that elevate them. I find this is be chasing feelings.

I think that things are worth pursing, regardless of how they feel. Justice for someone else, even when you're the one that wronged them, for instance. I think that it is worth while to admit to doing wrong, even when it feels awful, and it isn't worth while to simultaneously think that you must be great, and doing the right thing for doing all that.

Do you not think that knowing what the truth is, is a desirable thing, TGW, regardless of how it makes you feel?

That's one mighty guy.

As for physical issues, my right knee is bad, I was reminded of that today. Yesterday at yoga they had like a whole class about working up to a variation of pigeon pose, a balancing kind, "flying pigeon", I'm a frequent goer, and never do pigeon, which most classes involve one couple minute one near the end, but I forego it for a variation that my knee can handle. I don't speak much to anyone, and it probably wasn't about me, but I totally should have just left. Not that I've been to a doctor, but pretty sure it is cartilage damage, and when I bend my knee a certain way, it pops, and hurts for a minute, if I do it twice, it hurts for a few hours, three times and it will be sore for a couple of days. More than that in a single day, and I can barely walk on it, it will swell right up, and be sore for a week or two. Popped it three times during that yoga class, and then showing off today at work I was carrying two bundles up the ladder (which I can do now, and is almost my body weight), and had a moment of knee instability, and popped it again, and a second time while crouching near the edge of the roof -- so right now it hurts a lot. I'll have to break out the knee brace for a week or two, I guess.

Yup, no one is truly happy, and everyone that claims to be is full of shit, or tucking their doubts, longings, fears, and sadness into that big gaping empty hole in their soul. So what? Big whoop. The problem isn't that no one is happy, the problem is that so many people think that they're supposed to be.

We're playing a game, a game that involves strategy, and to play the game ethically is to not cheat, steal, use underhanded tactics, and make low quality moves.

Not playing the game at all doesn't make one ethical, and certainly burning the game to the ground so that no one can play doesn't make them like fucking Jesus, the most ethical of all! Ethics and morality only apply within the context of the game.

I don't really see the relevance, nor even appeal to being able to choose one's beliefs. I wish for them to be determined, as I'm sure that we all do. Determined by the true, the reasonable, and the good. What would be significant to me, is if what is said to determine our beliefs is something entirely irrelevant to facilitating true, good, and reasonable beliefs. This is not so easy to believe.

Just like any argument of reason, appeal to values/emotions, or empirical demonstration, the quotes wish to persuade. No, you don't have a choice exactly about whether or not they will be persuasive to you, but that doesn't mean that they won't be persuasive. In fact, it sounded like they were somewhat persuasive, given how jarring you found them to be, and worthy of contemplation. Clearly not jarring enough though!

Sure, but are moral facts the sort of facts that can lead to measurable consequences if we act in light of false moral beliefs? For example, if I falsely believe that killing babies is (im)moral then what sort of outcome could I expect? — Michael

I don't think that that on me. You said to suppose that there are moral facts. If they're the kinds of facts that don't matter consequentially in any sense, then who cares? I do happen to think that values are consequential to some extent, and I can't imagine a feasible scenario in which killing babies for fun would be a good thing to do.

It's like Ba da ba ba ba, I'm lovin' it. Nobody 'loves' McDonalds. That's just something they say in the commercials. — The Great Whatever

Lol, that's funny shit.

My older sister has OCD, she also has obsessive thoughts, as well as behavior. She takes meds for it, as well as anxiety. My fifteen year old little brother has epilepsy, as well as fair sever autism, he's a really good guy, but he is often teased for not being bright. A few years ago, his meds stopped working well, and he wasn't being given them punctually, and he began to have several mini seizures a day, and then eventually grand mals, which was a terrible thing. He would make a flat noise, begin to drool, and then start to seize, his body temperature would sky rocket, and when he came out of it, he was so scared, and said how much they hurt. I felt so bad for him. Luckily he has had his meds adjusted, and hasn't had any seizures in a couple of years, taking them just when he is supposed to.

I've not been diagnosed with anything, but there is the thing where I think that I'm a pixied nosed anime girl. My psychiatrist assures me that it's everyone else that's crazy, and I'm great though. Why do they always do that? Damn my irresistible charm!

I almost never used the quote function that loaded the reply page before, I always used the quick reply box at the bottom, or internal replies, so nothing is all that different for me. I suppose that you don't have to refresh pages to see new replies.

There's a balance to be found I think. Sure, I would love to live unrestrained, and uninhibited. Wosret to the max! -- but prudence, and care for consequence gets in the way, and probably should. The premise is still framed in terms of suffering and joy. Perhaps the sages are wrong, and there is more suffering in domestication and sublimation, and more joy in Dionysian thrills. The ideal, the good that I've been taught, and enchants me is irrespective of my own suffering and joy. One does good, high quality behaviors, which are pro-social (read moral), because they are high quality, and pro-social behavior regardless of how much personal suffering or joy they engender. When meeting conventions is insufferable for you, and the conventions are unjust, there are pro-social means of reproach.

Everyone has a rebellious streak, and wish to do what isn't permitted, at least in play, but most care too much about social ties, and consequences to become too uppity, and although there may be great joys to be attained in the most anti-social of behaviors, this in no way entices me.

Also when some God proofs or science of morality came along you all really seemed to enjoy trying to get through to them. Just my two cents. — Monitor

Who doesn't like fish in a barrel?

Yeah I know, and there're reasons for that, and if I may be so bold, many of those reasons have left the place.

You keep coming back to this, but I've claimed nothing of the like. As I already stated to Mongrel, my very mention of p-zombies was merely a joke. My only claim is that consciousness cannot be clearly identified with the specific qualities mentioned, or, rather, most things can convincingly be faked. I am of the opinion that there would be chinks in the armor, and that constructing genuinely conscious A.I. is not likely to ever happen. It seems to me, rather, that those that wish to say that it is likely to happen, just wish to set the bar for identifying an A.I. as conscious rather low. Or, the pro-A.I crowd is just super ready to make with the false positives.

That wasn't my objection, per se, as much as regardless of the criteria presented as qualifying something as a conscious A.I. or just a robot, it is a matter of plot whether or not they actually are conscious, or not, and thus the criteria presented are superfluous, or arbitrary. I at one point criticized the ones that make them just conscious somehow after "evolving" or getting more processing power or whatever as more fantasy than sifi, but my point was more that movies are deceptive. The two movies you were talking about, whether or not the A.I.s are conscious come down to the plot, and not the criteria, or qualities presented as justifying it. I agree with TGW, that based on this, movies will of course be deceptive in what kind of conclusion they wish the audience to draw about this, but was more focused on showing that the proposed qualities do not necessarily imply what they're suggested to in movie plots.

I don't know about p-zombies, but I do think that we need to be clear about what consciousness is in order to be clear about identifying it -- and all I attempted to do was give reasons why I thought that the examples failed to give knock down demonstrations that couldn't be explained in other ways.

No, it isn't, and I actually think that it will be more difficult for A.I.s to be able to parse natural language with an active physical world than merely abstractly in a conversation. I still don't take seriously such movies, which merely create the universe, and make whatever true they want, regardless of real world feasibility, and as Aristotle would tell you, rendered false the moment they're taken as true, and only retain their truth to the extent that they're understood to be false.

Clearly a fool proof test. We don't seriously question whether or not other people have minds, until the question is brought up, mainly because of their history, and origin, more so than their functionality.

I'm not sure that it does. All that it requires is a mastery of language, in my view.

Data is my fav. Though, he does explicitly claim to possess qualia.

But part of mastering natural language is the use of connotation, it is not mysterious, or a sign of consciousness for A.I.s that have mastered language to express feeling ways about things, it is a prerequisite of mastering natural language. Indecision being nothing more than options with regard to connotation, and siding this way or that being illiminative, based on some algorithm designed to avoid stagnation or paradox.

Secondly, it merely presupposes, or question begs a computational theory of intelligence, or consciousness, which implies, at base, that calculators are some degree conscious and intelligent.

Aren't those just movies that go the other direction and give them magic inexplicable consciousness? It is thus again, just written into the plot to convince you one way or the other, but we do have -- allbeit incomplete -- explanations for why organisms are goal directed, and even organisms that arguably are not conscious are goal directed. So, this too fails on two fronts. The first being that they just inexplicably become conscious as a plot device (approaching the definition of fantasy rather than science fiction), and secondly the quality that is presented to demonstrate their position of consciousness or awareness fails to do so.

Driving is a lot different out west than back east. Everyone speeds, and many speed excessively. You really only have to worry about real cops on the weekends, otherwise you might get hit with photo radar if you do it on a residential street, or near a school, which doesn't demerit your licence. Cars don't legally require safety inspections, it just helps with insurance prices, and things like that.

Mostly though, people are just really aggressive speeding drivers. A few weeks ago as well, I heard on the radio that someone was going around throwing rocks at photo radar vehicles, and wasn't getting caught, lol. I myself have two speeding tickets, unpaid. Mainly because you have to pay them at government agencies that close at like five in the afternoon, and I just don't have time for that. Now that they're past due, I have to pay them at a court house, which I will do when work ends. Five more houses as it stands.

Yes, I should definitely have to pay less for fines than some rich bastard. Did a house for one guy awhile ago that had a "wall of shame" in his garage with over ten thousand dollars worth of speeding tickets pinned to it, that guy ought to pay more than me.

Maybe the concept is interesting. Maybe because it was the only thing resembling a positive opinion or position I put forward, and people prefer to address positive positions than put them forward. Maybe because the first person decided to focus on that, and I obliged, it just naturally became focused on that, but it could have gone many other ways, depending on how the first reply went. Who knows.

You could have a potential p-zombie read a story with a novel twist on first person and ask them all sorts of questions. We know that humans, if they found the story interesting, would discuss and debate it at length. But how would a p-zombie make sense of it? — Marchesk

In fiction they often go out of the way to remind us that the A.I. is an A.I. by often nonsensically being unable to grasp some emotional experience. Like the Terminator claiming to have extensive data bases on human anatomy and function for medical purposes, and then five minutes later being all like "why is your face leaking? Crying is a mystery to me!". Problematic in two senses, first it is incongruent with its claims of extensive anatomical knowledge which would surely exceed even seasoned professionals in detail, and accuracy because of memory, and secondly because the question itself suggests and interest, and recognition of the face leaking as significant. So that ultimately it doesn't work to remind us that the A.I. isn't conscious, as much as demonstrate an odd kind of robot ignorance (which is what sifi usually resorts to when attempting to display this), While artificially, and implausibly inserting a gaping hole in the A.I.'s data base.

Humans that found the story interesting may discuss it at length if they felt comfortable enough, but may otherwise wish to say very little, because of being overwhelming by the pressure.Whereas some that didn't find it particularly interesting at all, may find lots to say about it, because they talk a lot under pressure, or simply like attention, and the opportunity to be listened to, or a million other motivations that may make people say much or little, regardless of interest. Much like a lie detector, such a test is arbitrary.

Modern A.I.s have no extensive memory, or parsing of natural language, and are easy to detect by asking them question about what has been said already, or meta questions, seeking specific, non-general responses. If an A.I. did master natural language (and it is only a matter of time before we design one that does), I don't see what kind of test one could design to decide whether or not it was truly conscious -- and I don't think that the artificial, implausible movie scenarios give any answers towards this.

My thought process for making this thread was that we ought to have threads about the key philosophical issues, like consciousness, and what it is. I ended up posing it all as questions, asking for people's opinions about what they thought consciousness was, and for this reason, just thought that I'd add "before I'm a zombie" at the end for shits and giggles. Funnily enough, that's what got all of the attention, so I just ran with it.

My own position is not that we're all zombies, if you think that I could be meaning that.

Yay Un!

So with you, there is no understanding. Why would a thing which can't understand... ask for an explanation? — Mongrel

Because that's what a thing that was interested, and could understand would do. Pretending to understand is often considered polite, walls aren't polite.

Good, good. I thought that you might see through my ruse.

Yes, I think that we should do that, turn on the blog, or set up the subdomain. I believe that Tiff was going to be working on facebook and twitters pages, where articles could also be posted.

It's funny that you ask me that, as I didn't see anything that I was replied to about as being all that significant to my point really. The point that I was trying to make was that meaning isn't a matter of reference back to some particle, or neutral object, but rather is a constantly changing, flowing relationship with people and the world, that we, and things take part in, or participate in. The big whoop is that the world apple doesn't refer to any particular apples, and when one does refer to an apple, it is being brought into participating with discourse for some purpose, and isn't the origin of the meaning of any terms, or the meaning maker.

There's a reason that the new owners over at PF are suggesting articles on topical current events, that can be plastered to popular web feeds. This is probably the best way to bring in traffic. Of course people are making a lot of search engine inquiries into what is current and topical, and having links to your site from other sites with a lot of traffic all improves your traffic. We can always sort the wheat from the chaff later, but that actually is a really good strategy for popularizing the website. I say that we steal it.

Because I meant it in a single sense, but it doesn't hold in other senses, which is what I said in that post, by saying that they can mean the same thing, or different things. As I said, it was clearly a poor choice of words.

But they clearly don't mean the same thing as language and things like apples are normally understood. And I see no good reason to abandon this understanding. I don't mean to talk about the word "apple" when I talk about the thing that is called an apple. They are not one and the same; they are one thing and another different thing. — Sapientia

Obviously you don't mean to talk about tasty apples when you mean to talk about the word "apple", but most uses of the word "apple" aren't meta, and do mean to talk about tasty apples, and not the word "apple".

No, I meant what I said, I just said more than that, which is being ignored so that that part can be misinterpreted. Clearly a mistaken, unclear choice of words, easily misinterpreted on my part though. I do think that it is difficult to maintain the misinterpretation in light of what else was said in the same post. It isn't as if I back peddle, or change what I said later. The post taken as a whole, it is clear that I wasn't calling spoken apples, written apples, drawings of apples, or tasty apples in every way identical.

That's just quote mining. I go on to clarify that they just mean the same thing, and then further clarify that they can mean the same thing, but can also mean different things. All in the same post. In another post I attempt to clarify this misreading by mentioning the law of the identity of indiscernibles -- or that if two things were truly identical, there wouldn't be two things at all, there would only be one thing. I then point out that two different apples obviously aren't identical either.

The point I'm trying to make is how the meaning is the same, and what is suggested to be references for the meaning rather participate in discourse and meaning, rather than are the sources of it.

Kind of weird how they keep talking about brain augmentations, and stuff...