If we were asked "what is the ball of fire in the sky?" — Tiberiusmoon

So the answer is: depends on what you want to use it for, on what you want to accomplish with it. — Amalac

I think Amalac has the point. The example question as stated is ambiguous, so it is hard to evaluate the quality of an answer to it.

Would you push the bar further up? Attain more. Buy more. Achieve more. Do more be more.

Or would you turn around and say nope, I’m happy with this now. And live the remainder of your life in that context with no more or no less than what you already possess.

Or, third option: would you decide that you preferred your old life. — Benj96

1. If you pushed further up - that would mean you don't really have everything or continuous pushing up is part of your desires.

2. If you have everything you desire including a path to continue this state, you'd just continue on said path I suppose.

3. If you returned to your old life, it would man that some of your desires are unfulfilled still in your situation of fulfillment, a contradiction.

In the end - total, lasting satisfaction is not something that human experience. For evolutionary reasons it is not a state of mind we can acquire in nature. It can be achieved with some kind of mind hacking perhaps.

And the choice of mapping is functionally irrelevant. — hypericin

No, it is relevant. Some mappings will be more useful to an individual, because of selective accuracy or speed of processing. Similar mappings will allow better communication between individuals possessing them using the same computational resources.

Therefore I think it is likely we all experience wildly different private hallucinations. — hypericin

If qualia map the reality then I think calling them hallucinations is really confusing. Our qualia are different, what do you mean by wildly different?

A conscious entity would need to interpret the information flow.

Yes, but not any interpretation suffices for consciousness in my opinion. Any information transformation could be arguably seen as interpretation and trivial information transformations are what for example inanimate objects do with information thrown at them.

My gut tells me that if an entity is able to match information to patterns, it is a mark of consciousness, though not necessarily a big one. By pattern i mean some generalized, meta-information that describes information succintly.

An animal being able to differentiate between predator and prey for example would have baked in (perhaps learned, but not necessarily) information patterns that allows it to do that.

An entity being capable of finding new patterns in the information would be in a certain way better that one that isn't capable to do that, but I'd argue that it would be useful to call them both conscious. It would be useful to have terms for both of those categories though.

P.S. Is there an automatic way to quote other posts in the style most people do that here? It eludes my perception.

Not sure if your post is an invitation to discuss or simply something you felt like posting.

It may be interesting to discuss it if someone has another take on it.

Scott Aaronson debunkificated this a while back.

Aaronson demonstrated that the IIT significantly doesn't match some of our intuitions about consciousness, so in my opinion IIT isn't correct, but IIT still matches very well some other of those intuitions. It may be used for example to recognize that a group of humans doesn't constitute a conscious entity greater than a single human.

In my opinion IIT is a great attempt at solving consciousness, surprisingly serious approach to solve a non-trivial philosophical problem. I'd really like to see it tweaked to make better cassifiers of conscious entities.

I think defining consciousness using only the flow of information is lacking. For starters I'd include that conscious entity needs to recognize patterns in this information.

Innocent mind sounds like an oxymoron to me. The more mind forms the more moral responsibility applies to it. What's more innocent than a fire or a plague?

Because it is possible, it is inevitable.

Yes.

I also came to the conclusion that sheer possibility of the existence may be the spawning point of reality that doesn't need further cause. That would mean that everything possible exists. If we interpret possible as non-contradictory, then a library of non-contradictory mathematical structures could populate reality, with our universe embedded in some. Later I found out that my thinking is in line with Max Tegmark's Mathematical Universe. Consider checking it out, it's 30 pages.

It seems to me that historical context should be included in the process of idea evaluation to the degree depending on the goal of the evaluation, ergo your question seems a bit nebulous to me. Can you give us your take on it?

Old people used to be more respected when they were seen as more useful for the larger community and frankly, there were less of them. Today in atomized, resource hungry, quickly changing society they are less help than they have ever been and the means needed to keep them involved in the community need to be rather extensive.

I agree that learning by practice is very good, do you mean that as learning by experience? It is rather troublesome though to organize practice for children if the parents work and the school system is suboptimally built. I think organizing partial employment for children from the age of 12 could be useful in that regard.

As for rights and responsibilities, they aren't from the same narrow category at all, I don't see a good use for a word for the sum of those sets. Both rights and responsibilities are granted by the ones that wield power, but they don't need to inherently balance each other out. It's true that most productive societies do have some partial balance between the rights and responsibilities, so it seems to be useful for the benefit of the societies. And if the US falls behind because of unbalance of rights and responsibilities, other societies with better structures will come ahead and your society will have an opportunity to correct itself and the humanity will learn a lesson.

You say that young people (that you know) goaded by fools grew demanding and stupid? Well it's real pity that the previous generations haven't fulfilled their responsibility to bring the new generation up to par. I don't know young Americans, but why in your opinion the older generations failed them?

How would you divine that your answer for the world peace is a correct one and what would be the price to be paid for the "world peace" seem to me indeed rather more important than what would be done with this peace knowledge.

I don't think that objectivity is a social taboo, people just aren't competent enough to recognize it. They can recognize some useful artifacts that were created using the objectivity though.

I think that low value of objectivity for common folk is the consequence of meticulous rationality trait on average not improving the fitness of the individual having it. This trait brought some great advances for the societies, but in their personal lives the people just don't see the immediate value of it to themselves.

Yet there is no excellence without shortcuts.

I think it would be better to start with what is a reflection, term ambiguous in itself. The "of self" part is the easy one imo.

For me reflection should involve recognition. To put it abstractly reflection would be a mark caused by entitiy when that mark can be recognized by a perceiver as bearing characteristics linked the the entity that caused the mark. In a way, depending on a perception of the perceiver, various marks may or may not be reflections to them, they can recognize the connections between some marks and entities that caused them and others they may not link.

Revolutionary technological breakthrough like the singularity ai could erase US. Any unfortunate war between major powers may lead to devastation of all belligerents, especially if murder technology progresses further. The easiest for me to imagine end to the US would be a civil war, but they are not frequent in established democracies.

The present definition of women is contested for various reasons, including political reasons, so there are many competing definitions.

As most definitions of classes of entities, "women" class is a cluster of instances of humans, the simplest way to recognize an instance of a woman is if we take specimen's traits, weigh them and compare weighted traits to the weighted traits of a woman archetype. If they are close enough then the instance is consider to belong to women class. There are more nuanced ways to define classes of entities.

The weights of the traits, comparison method and the woman archetype are being contested presently.

The classical definition of a woman wasn't genetically based, even if it was overwhelmingly determined by the genetics. The classical definition was based on fertile men (fertilizers) and fertile women (child bearers). The perceptible traits of fertile men and fertile women that were the most sharply different between those groups were used as the classifiers differentiating between whole men and women groups (whole groups include fertile and infertile specimens).