/sci/ - Science & Math

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ709yH9NqY

Benj Hellie's paper: http://individual.utoronto.ca/benj/ae.pdf

The vertiginous question is a phenomenal puzzle. People that think the question is meaningless are probably NPCs.

>>15139798
Because if I was someone else we would call me someone else.
It's just a matter of semantic convention.

>>15139973
I don't think we should be listening to someone like him.

>>15139978
He strikes me as a faggot, therfore I will not be reading his works.

>>15139973
>>15140030

>>15139798
Open individualism
Eternal recurrence
Solipsism

Take your pick

>>15140199
See >>15140133

I have decided:

The vertiginous question belongs to the genus of curiosities to which we may never have an answer. On such matters, we are bound by the constraints of limited perception. This limited perception may be the mere derivative of insufficient instrumentation with which to cognate. Would alterations to our cognitive faculties elicit answers to questions such as this? Could an invertebrate be made to ponder plato? The colossus of understanding which we may never summit, nor conquer to certainty, is a questions of this magnitude. Aloft, close enough to ensnare yet, beyond our grasp. Our only answer, though insufficient to quench our collective thirst, may be the Socratic paradox.

>>15139798
because i am my brain, and i am not another person or creature
the fact i am able to think i am conscious suggests consciousness manifests physically within my brain, and since my brain is isolated within my skull, i don't experience life as anything else

>>15139798
hmmm yes indeed, I don't heckin' know why

Pointless language game. Philosophical "why" questions are almost always ill-defined and inherently unanswerable not because of their hardness but because of their ill-definedness. This bullshit is just another attempt to discredit the actual important (scientific!) question posed by the hard problem of consciousness.

>>15139798
It's a nonsense question that refers to the same thing twice and asks why it is itself and not something else. To ask such a question is to imply that "X is not X" is a coherent alternative to "X is X".

>>15139987
To the contrary, people who think this is a serious question to be considered are subhumans who exist on the margins of sentience. This is the sort of stuff you wonder when you're literally 6 and then grow out of when you learn to think coherently and realize you are framing things wrong.

>>15139798
Law of Identity, plus, you are the conscious agent that is most consistent with the chemical reaction that you experience.
Why does the pot of water that you apply heat to tend to be the one that boils instead of some other random pot of water?

>>15139798
>>15139978
>>15139973
>The age-old question: Why am I me, and you you? Why not the other way around?
>copyright 2013 (C) benj hello DO NOT STEAL

>>15140425
>>15140575
>>15140582
>>15140584
==>>15140133

>>15140716
>Law of Identity
But is your identity, your awareness (not the self!) something physical? If not, how could you apply the law of identity?

>>15139798
>can X be Y when X is not Y ?
seriously...

>>15142032
==>>15140133

>>15139798
Who the fuck comes up with these retarded threads and spams them on /sci/?

>>15139798
It is peculiar that you are just this one point of view in particular. Expressing it in the form of a question is a natural thing to do, but I don't think it's the kind of question really demands an answer.

>>15142053
What could the possible motive for questioning identity and the connection between consciousness and the body be? Is it because spam-kun's identity doesn't align with their body?

>>15142053
Philosophy chad here,

Vulgar materialism sort of dropped a bomb on philosophy. By this I mean the acceptance of natural selection, the ever increasing body of evidence that what we call identity and ego is just another organic function like a kidney scrubbing piss, and many other kind of crappy things for the human spirit like the sun will fry us, the ecosystem is fragile, etc.

Back to the mind stuff, philosophy really needed to insert something other than what it looks like is obviously going on around here. This is the root of all "profound" questions of identity. Its like one pinky of humans being anything special holding desperately onto the ledge.

Because the other option is no meaning, and that would be a crisis for philosophy. The most honest philosophers are the pessimists because they're the only ones to accept it. That's the thing about reading even a short pessimist text. It feels honest. There's nowhere to hide in there.

>>15142110
Zapffe is not a philosopher. Back to preddit, NPC.

>>15142110
>Because the other option is no meaning, and that would be a crisis for philosophy.
The feared "lack of meaning" is only from the vantage point of a "meaningful world". Once the meaningful world is destroyed there will be no lack of meaning either. Philosophers should embrace their own destruction to save us from this "meaning" of theirs.

>>15142110
>"living in the shadow of the demise of God" thinking
Yeah you read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, we get it

>>15141095
The fact that your experience of you is tied to your physical body would indicate as much.
Logic is metaphysical applied philosophy and the law of identity is a law of logic not a law of physics.

>>15142110
>Because the other option is no meaning, that would be a crisis for philosophy.
Just because you find the philosophical response to be vulgar doesn't mean philosophy is in crisis, it just means your idealistic philosophical worldview reaches crisis attempting integration of compelling new emerging evidence that contradicts your philosophical biases.

>>15139798
Not /sci/ related

>>15142778
==>>15140133

>>15139798
>The vertiginous questionis as follows: of all subjects of experience, why isthisone—the one corresponding to the human being referred to as you—the one whose experiences you live through and not those of another person or creature?
Unironically fantastic question. Pseuds seethe because they can't understand phenomenology

>>15142772
Its weird you see it as my view, as though one can't speak generally when describing a concept.

>>15142206
Obviously not if you think those who absorbed Schopenhauer search for anything of use in Nietzsche.

>>15142110
Discovering Apollo doesnt make you woke. Dionysus always treads behind

>>15143091
>t. a 6 years old

>>15139798
we're all one, our collective or, all of our souls together is like wifi and each of our bodies are like phones. We only have the capacity (while in a body) to focus on our own individual experience and see life through our own two eyes because we're in a body. All of our minds are connected to that wifi so if I think of something someone on the other side of the world could think the same thing or vice versa or I could telepathically speak to you because we're connected. Collective consciousness.

Alright, philosophy fags. Are you ready for the ultimate and definite answer settling this question once and for all?

"It just is, okay?"

>>15142308
>The fact that your experience of you is tied to your physical body
That's not even given, it could travel around freely and I'd never know

>>15139798
>implying I could have been born as OP
Do you realize how insulting that is?
>>15139978
Wtf lol, I was saying this shit when I was 12, where is my philosophy PhD for this very original question

>>15144092
==>>15140133

>>15143133
Its weird to see you getting so emotional over some outdated concepts you deeply identify with that have been largely disproven by better concepts that you find vulgar due to how much better they apply to reality than your silly old ideals.

>>15139798
I find the fact that I find myself to be a particularly intelligent specimen of the most intelligent species known in the universe very suspicious. Based on the evidence, it seems that I was more likely to be a more intelligent organism rather than a less intelligent one. The vast majority of organisms find themselves to be bugs and shit, so if I had an equal chance of being anything then it would be an insane coincidence that I'm not an ant. Let alone a more average human.

I think that the more intelligent a brain is, the more "consciousness per minute" it experiences. I don't know if this should be visualized as having bigger/more consciousness, or the consciousness being denser, or having a higher framerate or something. But in any case, I think the "unit of consciousness" is the thing that you "are" rather than another one, not the organism. More intelligent organisms have more units of consciousness for your experiences in this instant to find themselves being, so it's not an insane coincidence that most experiences find themselves inside the brains of intelligent humans.

Phrased another way: imagine that Art's brain generates the question "why am I me and not someone else" a thousand times per year, whereas Bob's brain generates this question only ten times per year. That means there are 100 times more "why am I Art" experiences in the universe than there are "why am I Bob" experiences. A random experience is 100 times more likely to find itself inside Art rather than Bob.

>>15144103
> I was more likely to be a more intelligent organism rather than a less intelligent one.
>The vast majority of organisms find themselves to be bugs
Ants beat humans to every civilization milestone agriculture, architecture, antibiotics, global conquest, etc, they are better positioned to survive climate change or nuclear apocalypse, for all your talk of being the most intelligent, you really have no way of even knowing if ants have conquered other planets when pretty much everywhere humans have gone they have found ants were already there and humans didn't even know ants could make ships out of themselves and sail the high seas until just a few decades ago but ants have been doing it for millennia,

>>15144185
> I was more likely to be a more intelligent organism rather than a less intelligent one.
>The vast majority of organisms find themselves to be bugs
Ants beat humans to every civilization milestone agriculture, architecture, antibiotics, global conquest, etc, they are better positioned to survive climate change or nuclear apocalypse, for all your talk of being the most intelligent, you really have no way of even knowing if ants have conquered other planets when pretty much everywhere humans have gone they have found ants were already there and humans didn't even know ants could make ships out of themselves and sail the high seas until just a few decades ago but ants have been doing it for millennia,

>>15144460
Ants are cool animals, but my definition of intelligence for the purpose of this discussion isn't needlessly anthropocentric, nor is it a value judgement about whether ants are any good. It's very narrowly defined as a measure of how many instances of subjectivity are generated per unit of time inside an organism. Humans must have a million times "more" subjectivity than ants. Otherwise you can't explain why I'm a human and not an ant. There are 7 billion humans and 20 quadrillion ants, that's more than a million times more ants than humans. Either I rolled a 1 in a million roll to be a human rather than an ant, and my theory is wrong, or I rolled a 99% roll to be a human rather than an ant and my theory is right. The latter is more likely.

>>15139987
The qualia dial is actually a retarded idea though and not any less arbitrary than the strawman computationalism he's arguing against.

>>15142053
some tard having a slow motion manic episode and some kind of saviour complex about convincing people to let go of materialism

>>15144609
>. It's very narrowly defined as a measure of how many instances of subjectivity are generated per unit of time inside an organism.
So its something you can't actually measure?

>Humans must have a million times "more" subjectivity than ants.
Then they would have discovered all that stuff I said about the world a million time "more" quickly, but they didn't ants conquered the globe first, built megalithic structures first, enslaved other animals to their own needs first, and learned to develop medicine to fend off invisible threats of microorganisms first.

>Otherwise you can't explain why I'm a human and not an ant.
Because if you were an ant, you would being doing ant things and would be way ahead evolutionary than the form you are in now where you can't even figure out what you are or why.

>The latter is more likely.
Unlikely things happen all the time because they must happen if they couldn't happen they would be called impossible rather than unlikely but whether 1 in 10 or one in a million, its bound to happen and you are proof and the ants are proof that they do it much better and are more intelligent as a whole (and lively as individuals, but since that can't even be measured its a moot point) than humans as a species, even by your definition which can't even answer why there are both ants and humans instead of just the one thing that is most likely or whatever.

I'm amazed how people totally miss the point of the question. The NPC meme is real.

1. if you were someone else, you would still ask this question
2. is there ANY state of affairs or way-the-world-could-be that would NOT make you ask this question?

>>15139798
It's basically the same as wondering why is the present moment in time this specific moment rather than some other moment in the past or the future.

>>15140030
>Because if I was someone else we would call me someone else.
That doesn't actually explain anything. The fact of the matter is that my locus of awareness perceives the world in this particular form.

>>15145161
Yes and if it was in a different form, you would be called something else.

>>15145194
>not knowing the difference between how you are perceived from the outside and what you perceive from the inside

>>15144659
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gvwhQMKvro

>>15145421
Either way if you were something else that could perceive, you would be perceived differently from the outside and you would perceive from a different inside state.

>>15143711
this but unironically

>>15139987
I don't agree. I think the vertiginous question arises from a disconnect from how we perceive reality and reality itself. We experience nothing but our own experiences, which is something we notice. Then we wonder why we don't experience other people's experiences, even though if we did, they would definitionally become our own experiences. We don't experience other people's experiences because we are not them. If we did experience them, we would be them. This is not zombie materialist nihilism. It does not even contradict open individualism. Switch the question to another person's perspective, or an objective perspective (if you're religious, then God's perspective). Why is anon experiencing anon's experiences and not mine? Because anon is not me. Anon is defined to be the part of consciousness which experiences anon's experiences and only anon's experiences. It's like asking one person where they were when 9/11 happened and then being surprised why you only heard about where THEY were when 9/11 happened.

>>15139798
Whatever you define yourself by is isolated or filters the external.

>>15145631
>Then we wonder why we don't experience other people's experiences, even though if we did, they would definitionally become our own experiences
That's exactly the point. Who 'are' we even, if we can just become somebody else by stealing their experience? You have to either assume the existence of something supernatural like an eternal soul (atman) or question existence altogether.

>inb4 you are your consciousness
doesn't really work since consciousness is everything but persistent

>>15139798
Yes, and also why do you live now and not at a different time.
>>15139987
Theres no need to puff up your feathers in some exhibition of pride over your imagined superiority