News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:What Is It Like to Have a Brain?: Nineteen Ways of Lookin... by PaulDavisThe1st on Friday October 14, 2022 @07:38PM (#33210066)
Not unexpectedly, I do not agree with this characterization.

Short of panpsychism (which could be a thing), I think we mostly all agree that there are almost certainly objects in the world in which there is no experience By contrast, I think we mostly all agree that we (each of us as individuals, and humans as a group) are things in which experience does occur.

This naturally gives rise to the question: if some set of things have no experience, and another set of things have experience, how does experience arise in the the second set of things?

There are subsidiary question, such as whether experiences may come in different "levels" thus creating a continuum between "none" and "definitely experiencing". But these are secondary, mostly, the question of how things in which experience occurs differ from the things where it does not.

Re:What Is It Like to Have a Brain?: Nineteen Ways of Lookin... by lioeters on Friday October 14, 2022 @11:14PM (#33211378)
Depending on the definition of "mind", panpsychism sounds rather reasonable: "the view that the mind or a mindlike aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

It could be that a rock, an ant, a computer, and a human being are all experiencing its existence at varying levels of awareness. And that this "experience" isn't necessarily exclusive to living things - though it may be impossible to prove or understand how a computer experiences itself, if at all.

It's also amusing to entertain the opposite, the perspective of people who deny the existence of "experience and qualia" altogether, who argue there is no "hard problem of consciousness" in the first place. Maybe people experience consciousness so differently, for some it's "invisible", and for others it's undeniable and obvious that it exists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

Re:What Is It Like to Have a Brain?: Nineteen Ways of Lookin... by NateEag on Saturday October 15, 2022 @12:41PM (#33216279)
> Maybe people experience consciousness so differently, for some it's "invisible", and for others it's undeniable and obvious that it exists.

Indeed. I have seen it proposed by hard problemists that people to whom it is "invisible" may in fact be p-zombies.