/lit/ - Literature

I am extremely lonely and I dont have any friends I also want to kill myself all the time but I really like that cap of megumin its good anime and making really low effort shitposts on 4chan is the only thing that eases my conscience

>smug megumin
I had a girl look at me like this once.

Who cares.

>explain how my motherboard looks like a colourful plastic square but on the screen I can play video games

>>16452039
>dead matter can inexplicitly turn into subjecive experience

>>16451979
Studying philosophy of mind is how I ultimately overcame my belief in materialism. No materialist explanation of consciousness is adequate.

>>16452054
What explanation is?

>>16452064
None that I'm aware of. It's still a great mystery.

>>16452064
Idealist explanations of various kinds can be used to explain consciousness, but no materialist explanation is possible at all. That's what anon was referring to.

>he thinks he can explain consciousness

>>16451979
Through natural selection.

The best option was maybe Integrated Information Theory and it's trash. No one is close to an answer.

>>16451979
>i don't know how it works so it can't be true

>>16451979
It emerged from the material

>>16451979
No such thing

>>16452012
Go whore yourself somewhere else.

Don't know don't care

>>16451979
YOU explain how consciousness emerged. Immaterialist positions are equally incapable of doing so besides saying it's magic.

>>16451979
Consciousness is imbued into matter, get enough matter together in the right order and it becomes alive.

>>16452179
>magic
Yes, consciousness and existence is literal magic. That’s our whole thing.

>>16452230
Explain magic then. Hint: you can't.

>>16452281
>superhuman dimension of reality beyond human perception
wow that was easy

>>16452230
>What happens when an animal or person dies? Something seems to have departed— something like a vital spark that makes the difference between life and death. In the nineteenth century philosophers believed that there really was such a thing and called it the élan vital, or vital spirit. But when twentieth century science began to unravel the mysteries of how living things work and reproduce, the idea was abandoned and people now accept that there is nothing more to being alive than complex, interrelated, biological functions.

>>16452301
That just supposes an unobservable and unconfirmable speculative metaphysics. You might as well say consciousness is caused by millions of little fairies.
I bet you believe in a personal God.

>>16452054
This and now I'm constantly exposed to cringe because of it with no noticable benefit.

>>16452342
I am God

>>16451979
https://youtu.be/RAA1xgTTw9w

This about sums it up

>>16452342
>meanwhile you presuppose the already incomplete, similarly unobservable and uncomfirmable field of biochemistry as the basis of truth (but also simultaneously an object arrived at through perception, somehow)

Evolution.

>>16451979
>Ok materialist cucks, you think you’re so smart? Explain how consciousness emerged. Go ahead try.
I dont have to i know it will be explained sooner or later explained by science
beats believing in ghosts inhabiting meat prisons

>>16452039
This but unironically

It's an illusion.

>>16451979
>I can't explain thing therefore God

>>16451979
How does the mind arise?
It doesn’t matter.
It’s not matter?
Look, never-mind.

>>16452082
>dude rocks just turned into life which then naturally selected unfathomably complex sensory organs and n consciousness n shit lmao
>it's all just chemicals moooorrrrttyyy *burp*

>>16451979
Simple. Consciousness is an epiphenomen. It is like surface reflections on the water of the lake or the froth on the wave.

This is all that consciousness amounts to. It is causally insignificant and thus scientifically irrelevant.

>>16452039
You can apply this analogy to the whole computer, in fact. How can a computer and many lines of text produce a real-time interactive software like a video game? Those that don't understand emergence theory will say, "it doesn't" even though we all know it does.

>>16451979
Consciousness is being a certain kind of functioning brain

>>16452915
The only reason we have science to begin with is that we presume our consciousness will benifit from the material comfort it *supposedly* provides. take consciousness away and science is pointless.

>>16452915
>epiphenomen
But this is intrinsically false, Everything is experienced through the medium of consciousness so it is always the prime phenomenon at work. it must be beofre scien ce, if anything causation and science is the epiphenomenon. you can only say otherwise in terms of seeming practicality rather than empirical and theoretical fact.

>>16453073
>emergence can smuggle in wholly other ontology

>>16452064
Advaita Vedānta, you can find many of same ideas in Sufism, Tantra, Kabbalah, Christian Neoplatonism etc as well although overall Advaita seems have the most logical and coherent explanation of how it all works

>>16453105
>wholly other
This is the part where you're mistaken, because then you'd have to say the same thing about a video game in relation to the computer and all levels of code running it.

>>16453159
The game and its underlying hardware and software is perfectly comprehensible as a physical system, there's nothing radically new here. Consciousness is completely different.

>>16452713
illusions like mirages are not self-apprehending, I am self-apprehending, therefore my consciousness is not an illusion

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

>>16453201
Imagine being such a cuck you agree with the notion that your whole being is causally impotent.

>>16453181
At the bottom of everything for the video game is 1s and 0s. Somehow, these on/off triggers can be configured in such an intricate enough way with the right electrical components that they can produce something as complex as a video game, where physics, time, visual depth, and all kinds of complex interactions are simulated by them. Yet the video game still emerges from 1s and 0s. Why is consciousness any different from this?

>>16453211
Ok bro

>>16453220
because consciousness is necessary to even first cognizies 1s and 0s. Its like looking at things through tinted lenses, no matter what you see, the tint of the glasses will always be first.

>>16453231
>consciousness is necessary to even first cognizies 1s and 0s
Why does that mean that atoms — essentially 1s and 0s — can't be configured in a similarly intricate way, with the right configuration of components, to produce something which seems so impressive and incredible to us that it seems separated from the original atoms, when we know through understanding how a computer works that the video game isn't separate from the 1s and 0s at all?

>>16453220
The extraordinary thing about consciousness has nothing to do with complexity, though a certain complexity may be necessary to generate it, it's not sufficient an explanation.

>>16452082
>believing in evolution

>>16453240
>Why does that mean that atoms — essentially 1s and 0s — can't be configured
the operative words there are
>Why does that mean {x} cant
yuo can say that about anything anything could be. anything is possible, but that doesnt take away from the fact that all those possibilities apodicticly have consciousness as a prerequest of being.

>>16453240
A corpse has such a composition of atoms, yet it is not conscious -- as far as we know.

What is missing? Is it the atoms of consciousness? If so, where do we find such atoms? Where do they come from?

>>16453280
But what makes consciousness different, and why? And no, we can't really say that about anything, because there's only so many good analogies to be made between an organism and something else. A computer is a pretty decent analogy because it's made up of various components working in unison through mere 1s and 0s to produce things that seem to us completely unrelated to the original bits.

>>16453288
A fried computer can't run a video game either.

>>16452744
>Anything not materialism is theism

>>16452915
Thing is without consciousness there is no truth. There is no science. If all we are is chemical reactions there is nothing to accurately base empiricism on. Logic doesn’t exist.

>>16453356
What if that's the case?

>>16453360
Truth obviously exist, for example it rained yesterday where I lived is an objecivily true statement.

>>16453366
>Truth obviously exist
Yeah, at a glance, when you don't investigate it.

>>16453341
It's a shit analogy and you should feel ashamed for raising it. Vacuous scientism is a pox on our species.

>>16453371
If it rains on you, and you say "it rained on me" how could that not be true?

>>16453376
Why is it a shit analogy? Do you have a better one?

>>16453378
What is the "I" referring to? What is time? Kant already investigated these premises and concluded that these are subjective.

>>16453386
There are no analogs to consciousness, that's the point.

>>16453389
Okay, so why is the computer analogy a shit one?

>>16453392
Computations are comparable to cognition but consciousness is something else entirely to even cognitions about consciousness.

>>16453402
I think you're missing my point. Do you not agree that, for someone who doesn't understand how a computer works, to that person, the video game and the computer will seem wholly unrelated, and it will seem impossible for the computer to have produced the video game? Suppose you gave some tribal person a virtual reality headset to try. Wouldn't he have to rely on faith in order to connect his experience with it with the physical hardware? Wouldn't he be more predisposed to thinking the video game came from somewhere else? Isn't it likely that this resembles our position on the matter of consciousness and the body?

>>16452054

>therefore god/soul?

God of the gaps breh.

>>16453417
>Wouldn't he have to rely on faith in order to connect his experience with it with the physical hardware?
you give our ancestors way too little credit. They had the same mental capaicity we do. Maybe if you went to some superstitious black tribe like the adman islanders they'd go all "ooga booga dis magic" but if you went to Greece, Rome, or an edeucated Medeval Person they would have probably deduced that a computer or video game is some sort of machine, and that it's not magic.

>only rebuttal is that consciousness itself doesn’t exist
Clearly not true. Else know there is an I’ve served because we consciously one serve. If there was nothing but empty space before us we would still observe. Therefore some sort of observer must at least exist and this is us. Therefore consciousness must exist. Qualea is a real game phenomenon you can’t deny this because you yourself experience it.

>>16453435
I wasn't talking about ancestors. I was talking about someone alive today, like an African aboriginal who has had no exposure to our civilization. But you seem to agree that that person would have to rely on faith to make the connection.

>>16453441
>because you yourself experience it.
Unless he's a P zombie of course :^)

>>16453441
It's not like anyone opposing emergence theory is giving a reason as to why emergence theory doesn't work.

>>16453417
No, it isn't likely, because while you could teach a tribesman the basic ideas (if not the full physical picture), consciousness seemingly can't be explained by anything IN PRINCIPLE, no matter how complex the explanation is. Earth level physics is very nearly complete, we only don't know what happens around quantum gravity, and nothing in there resembles a single grain of consciousness whatsoever. I don't see how simply piling on complexity could help this situation.

>>16453462
>consciousness seemingly can't be explained by anything IN PRINCIPLE, no matter how complex the explanation is
That would be because we are the conscious beings. None of us are God, i.e., none of us possess or can possess the perspective of the universe itself, so we'll never have all the data on how the universe works. At some point we can only intuit the premise from abstraction. So far, in doing just that, there's been no reason to think consciousness is coming from somewhere other than the body through emergence, other than as a cope for those who can't intuit the premise from abstraction.

>>16453475
It may seem to you that there's no reason to suppose there's anything unusual or special going on but that's only because you're dogmatically committed to the current physical picture of the world, perhaps due to your atheism, and it's blinding you to the most obvious fact there is. Emergentism of consciousness, just like panpsychism and other purported explanations, is an extraordinary claim and the burden is on you to demonstrate it, which you haven't done, a weak analogy isn't an explanation.

>>16453526
>you're dogmatically committed to the current physical picture of the world
>dogmatically
No. The appropriate word here would be "practically." I'm practically committed to it, because there's no reason to think there's something other than it. At no point does anything logically point to something other than it. We have uncovered countless mysteries over the millennia with all the solutions being settled without any inclusion of a "non-physical" world.

The unintelligent person who is incapable of understanding how a computer works sees the video game as having no relation to the computer. In the same way, one's consciousness appears to the person who is incapable of inferring through probability analysis and context as having no relation to one's body. Nothing has ever been given that convincingly poses the possibility of a non-physical factor, which is almost reason itself to think that there isn't one.

>>16451979
Jesus, the Son of God, said in John 6:63:

the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.