this post was submitted on 12 May 2023
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philosophy
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Other philosophy communities have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. [ x ]
"I thunk it so I dunk it." - Descartes
Short Attention Span Reading Group: summary, list of previous discussions, schedule
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the point of those thought experiments is to illustrate that the experiential components of a living beings existence (known to philosophy nerds as Qualia) are not necessary to explain the biological/physical phenomenon of life. a computer can process information too but it doesnt experience it as far as we can tell. even phenomenon like the weather can be considered an information processing system but we don't typically attribute consciousness or internal experience to it. hypothetically you could therefore have had humans or other life that behave in all the same ways and do the same information processing tasks but without an internal experience of their existence, and the fact that we dont have that but we have us instead may mean consciousness is more than just information processing or illusion. its not strictly an argument for dualism, but as part of the discourse against a physicalist materialist conception of consciousness as illusion, or information processing. personally i think consciousness is somehow fundamental to existence in ways we dont understand, like space, time, or matter, and even phenomena from subatomic particles to stars might have an incomprehensible-to-humans internal experience of some kind.