Nailed it. It sounds just like auditory hallucinations right at the edge of consciousness.
That sneeze-drop is great
You don’t make your own robot lover either. You do select it, same as you select your fast food order, porn video, and TV channel.
You would think so, wouldn’t you? But how is it any different than fast food, porn, or trash tv?
I predict that once robotics and AI advanced beyond some particular threshold, human-on-human relationships will be seen as strange and needlessly fetishistic. Who would want some grimey partner with their own needs when you can generate an infinitely moldable soulmate?
On a serious note, yes Christmas was placed where it was in order to coincide with Saturnalia, the Roman winter solstice festival. This was an attempt by Constantine, the emperor who legalized Christianity in Rome, to transition the Romans to Christianity more easily.
The third person neuter pronoun in English, but that’s not important right now.
I like Nobody Cares more, personally
That’s what we were going for. Thing is, any "system* of checks and balances is composed of the corrupt individuals it’s designed to check and balance. Sociopaths gravitate to positions of power, and are really great at campaigning for them.
What’s your alternative to the present system, sortition?
Emergence is actually a considerable personal interest of mine, so this is a fun topic for me, and your position is one I used to hold. There’s a basic problem with this line of thinking though.
Emergent patterns and behavior are observed, only. The emergent property isn’t composed of any substance, it is a mathematical construct. That is to say, the higher order organization of ant colonies and bird flocks do not in and of themselves experience qualia. They certainly might look like it from the outside, but that’s the entire point of emergence: this “substance” is an illusion, there is no subjective experience associated with the ant colony or the bird flock. Each individual has it, but the collective itself only looks like it does.
Consciousness is made of some “substance”. The experience itself is made out of “I am”, whatever that is. So if you’re being intellectually honest, and follow the logic fully, you come to one of two conclusions :
The logical conclusion of this line of thinking is that it’s more likely than not that the entire universe has an emergent consciousness.
The logical conclusion of that line of thinking is that there is a panpsychic field permeating the universe.
I’m very explicitly not saying that there’s literally a giant bearded man who lives in the clouds who got into a fight with a talking snake. All of that is a combination of metaphors to explain abstract concepts to bronze age shepherds, translation errors, and bad faith actors trying to secure power for themselves.
What I am saying is that a thorough persistence in the rational exploration of the phenomenon of subjectivity leads one to a universe-spanning consciousness of one nature or another, and that attempts to describe it with human language evoke descriptions consistent with pretty much every major cultures core concept of God before the power-hungry priests started telling people that the universal consciousness will punish them for being naughty.
Personally I’m in the panpsychist camp. I don’t know how much physics you’ve taken, but the modern view basically treats everything as the interaction of fields.
we can conclude that it is an emergent property that has arisen like other properties emergent from biological matter
Examples?
Brainwashed mostly, both parties contribute, but the right wing significantly moreso. Focus is actively concentrated on culture/morality issues like gun control, abortion, sexuality, etc. so that voters make decisions based on those positions rather than material issues. Additionally, American politicians have led a smear campaign against socialism for at least a century. You can’t vote for the scary socialists, they murder babies and destroy the economy and force everyone to get sex changes.
Keming
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Good, you’ve got the gist: a ridiculous claim centered in an observable phenomenon does not invalidate that phenomenon.
Now replace electricity with consciousness, subjective experience itself. We observe consciousness, we are consciousness, of course it exists. It is important to investigate the cause, determine the nature of the phenomenon and consider seriously the possible explanations.
By a due investigation, and serious and rational consideration, what possible explanations do you find for consciousness?
The Abrahamic religions do not have a monopoly on the concept of God. The irrationality of their particular fables, talking snakes and walking on water and all the behavioral quirks they claim God has expressed, has nothing to do with the concept itself.
Let’s say I popularized the idea that electricity is really just tiny pixies dancing around, and I came up with all manner of personality traits and stories to go along with them. Let’s say millions, billions of people embraced my pixie theory, and it mutated over time into schismatic alternatives with their own traits and stories. Do the ridiculous things now ascribed to electricity, so pervasively that most people picture little pixies when they hear the words, prove that electricity doesn’t exist?
Misconception?