Panpsychism has merit.
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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We aren't special. Conciousness is a side effect of having so many neurons shaped by millions of years of social and environmental darwinism. We are actually barely concious to avoid confronting the fact that we are just walking meat.
If human head transplants were done, we would have proof that the soul is just a sophisticated algorithm held within our meat, but even then, our barely concious state will refuse to compute the actual implications.
Further our "singular conscious" is an illusion. People with various types of physical brain damage have had their awareness "split" and had something akin to two different consciouses in their brain. Even for "normal" people there are independent processes running in our brain. Our consciousness is in charge sort of the way the teacher is in charge of the nursey school. It might decide when recess is but it can't stop that one kid from just singing for no reason.
Also to your point I think that if we could transplant a head we'd find that our sentience involves more than the brain. I think we underestimate how connected all of our systems are.
I've always thought that what makes me the most happy is trying not to care about material things. Just stuff I make myself is what I care about most. I made my own music player app and it's garbage compared to everything else available but I still love it. I feel like this is a pretty popular opinion to hold though.
What is your music player app?
I have a saying, if the people no longer respect the government rules, shall the state end up in anarchy.
“Consciousness” is not a multitude instances of which you have one of, it’s something singular that has you.
We are all the same weird mirror rippling through space-time trying to figure out how to outfox entropy.
"Free will", as almost anyone defines it, is completely indistinguishable from no free will.
Also: The universe exists as a manifestation of pure math. In the same sense that the answer to "What is 9827349328659327498327592432^98374239563298473298324253?" exists even if nobody bothers to actually calculate it, the answer to "What does a universe with [these] parameters look like at t = 13.7 billion years look like?" exists as well - and it looks like you. A lot of people agree that it might be in principle possible to simulate the universe - even if it requires something silly like a computer larger than the universe. I just take it a step further and say that if a simulation is possible, even only in principle, then actually carrying out the simulation isn't a necessary step.
I just take it a step further and say that if a simulation is possible, even only in principle, then actually carrying out the simulation isn't a necessary step.
My hunch (and this is just a hunch) is that in some cases this might be true but not in the general case. The universe contains turning machines. So one cannot arbitrarily determine a future state without also disproving the Halting Problem.
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Optimistic Nihilism.
Consciousness is an accident, the universe is an emergent property of physical laws, and there is no purpose to any of it; no gods, no guiding intention, no natural morality, no afterlife. Just entropy.
This is a good, positive thing to understand.
If there is no intrinsic morality, then we are free to define morality for ourselves. This is a burden, but it something that we can recognise and think critically about, rather than just taking whatever tradition we were raised in, and picking and choosing as is convenient.
If there is no afterlife, then every act of alturism, every kind thing we do we can do because we want to. Not because we are afraid of damnation, but because we decided that it was the right thing to do.
If we leave nothing behind but dust, then we must be aware of the impact we have now, because our time is limited and brief.
If we are a random collection of atoms, a brief coherent pattern among the chaos, then we can recognise that every single other person is the fundamentally the same.
I don't believe in free will meaning that what ever you did you could not have done otherwise. We live in a deterministic universe and all events are part of a causal chain