kronisk @ arken @lemmy.world

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Joined

2 yr. ago

This seems like a good opportunity to tell the story of "Balloon man"

Well, the interesting thing about that quote is that Socrates was completely correct. People used to be able to recall long epic poems from memory, not just one, but an entire book shelf's worth of information. This ability was lost among people in general. However people, and society, adapted.

Although the argument you and a lot of other people seems to be making is the equivalent of saying "well, I've had cancer before, and the doctor said it was serious then, but I survived - so it's going to fine this time as well". I don't think it holds up.

Well, all this feels a bit weird to me as a european. Americans and british pronounce it as f-you-g, but it's a french loan word, in french /fyg/ (y as in the last letter in particularly). The word itself however comes from the latin fuga, and in german and a lot of other languages the word is fuga or fuge. Fuga is of course pronounced foo-gah (well, not exactly, but close enough) so...I wouldn't laugh that hard at someone mispronouncing the word in "English" if I were them is my point I guess.

https://www.progressiveboink.com/2012/4/21/2960508/worst-rob-liefeld-drawings

We need to stop calling these sites and services "free". Anything that's financed by ads, spying and profiling is not free, the user is paying with their attention, integrity and right to privacy. This is not nothing.

Presently, it's a shady and dishonest practice since the terms of the transaction are rarely transparent to the consumer; in other words, it's a scam.

Lots of greenwashing going on here too. The nordic countries are just as capitalist as anywhere else, we just had a strong labour movement in the 19th and 20th century. And sadly, a lot of what was won has been slowly whittling away in the last decades due to the complacency and inaction of the generations after.

For our younger audience: this is from when the show Cheers was popular, that's why there's a "Norm" setting.

Well, but what does "caring" mean? It means that their well-being affects your emotions.

That would be an extremely reductive definition that doesn't really tell us much about how caring for others is actually experienced and how it manifests in the world. How would this for example explain sacrificing yourself to save another person, if the very core of caring is to create positive emotions in yourself? Dying is a pretty negative thing to experience and there will be no more positive emotions for you after that. I guess this idea that caring is in its essence transactional feels profound to people because we're so ingrained with capitalist ideology... but it's a lot more complex and multifaceted than that.

Of course, you only ever do things because there's something in it for you,

No, sometimes you do things because you care about other people and want to help them. That you also probably feel better about yourself than you would if you did shitty things all day doesn't mean that feeling is the only and single motivation.

We hear that argument a lot, and though some people's charity may be motivated purely by egoism I don't think it applies to the majority at all. The argument assumes that if doing something makes you feel good, then that feeling must be the sole motivation for that action, which is dubious. And if we follow this logic to its natural conclusion, every action that does not make you feel bad is egoistic, and the concept becomes completely meaningless. Saving a child from falling down a cliff? Egoistic! Intervening when someone is treated unfairly? Egoistic! Giving up your chair for an elderly person on a crowded bus? Egoistic!

Let's take this last (admittedly small, everyday, non-dramatic) example. Sure, you could give up your seat purely because you want to look like a good person to others (although it's doubtful anyone would even notice). It's also possible to experience this feeling called empathy, to see an elderly person struggling to keep their balance while standing up and to want to alleviate that particular suffering. Everyone else is sitting down looking at their phones, so there's no community pressure to speak of. No one would call you out if you just pretended not to notice. And the discomfort from standing up on a really crowded bus on a bumpy road could easily outweigh that little buzz you get from doing good.

I'll go even further; it's even possible, in a scenario like this, to not even think about how it's going to make you feel or your self-image or whatever. You just want to help someone else because it's in your power to do so. If this isn't an example of not being egoistic, what would be? What would be the opposite of egoism? To act completely dispassionately?

And what about someone sacrificing their own life to save another? Striving to do good in the world does feel better, yes, but empathy is also a burden. Still, there are genuinely good people out there, that do good deeds and do not take any credit for it, even do it anonymously. And I can tell you from experience, not all of them walk around on clouds feeling like saints. Some of them even experience crippling guilt because they feel they do not do enough. How is that egoism?

But the reality I see is that they are very easily manipulated by unregulated media like TikTok

As opposed to adults?

I have done plenty of research, thank you. Of course even more research never hurts.

The hides of giant mutated squirrels

Er, that’s what I am saying however is that you can observe and measure consciousness.

Going with any definition of consciousness relevant to this discussion, say phenomenality and/or awareness, no.

I am not sure why it’s hard to accept that some living things may not be conscious. Viruses propagate “mindlessly”, they’re neither living nor conscious.

That's not really the point - I don't claim to know what entities possess consciousness. The point is that you don't either.

I also don’t understand why you think emergent properties are a hypothesis. Emergent properties of biological processes are fact

Obviously I'm talking about Emergentism as it relates to consciousness, and the idea that consciousness is an emergent property is not a fact, no. And there are perfectly valid reasons - for example, the "explanatory gap" - why someone might find it unsatisfactory.

So, I'm guessing everyone in this thread has a different conception of what "consciousness" actually is and what we're talking about here, which makes it difficult to discuss casually like this. You seem to have a very exclusive definition of consciousness, which only serves to avoid the argument, really. "It’s possible that same organisms exhibit some parts of consciousness as we have noticed till now, but if those organisms do not exhibit all parts of consciousness then they’re not conscious"...you're splitting hairs. If plants could be proven to be aware, have subjective experience, a sense of self, it would be reasonable to change our definition of consciousness to be more inclusive - simply because such a concept of consciousness would be a lot more useful then.

Emergentism is a popular hypothesis, not a fact. Christof Koch lost the bet, remember? The idea that "all organisms which are conscious have to exhibit the same properties" and "you cannot pick and choose" does not logically follow from anything you've said. These are criteria that you set up yourself. Take the idea of qualia as an example, how could we ever observe that an animal or a plant does or does not experience qualia? Nobody solved the problem of other minds.

Consciousness is nothing like a heart; the function of the heart can be observed and measured. How do you know that you possess awareness? You can only experience it. (Actually, that we are aware is the only thing we can know with complete certainty.)

which we don’t observe in those which lack consciousness.

See what you did there? You assume a priori which entities lack consciousness, and then motivate this by claiming they lack traits that can be observed in conscious entities. That is very neatly circular.

Food service and retail needs to exist, (commercial sales) call centers should be banned and their owners shunned from polite society.

Best and easiest way is to reverse image search from a photo, it's easy to look through the results for yourself and see what actually matches (it's frequently not the first search result). Perhaps there's some kind of AI involved in reverse image search, but searching like this is infinitely preferable to me instead of some bot telling me an answer which may or may not be correct. It's not "convenient" if you actually care about the answer.

I wish I could give this comment more than a simple upvote. I want to mail you a freshly baked cinnamon bun.

Sure, nothing is more masculine than having a preference for men.