Well, it’s rather pointless to debate the existential “reality” of a fictional character; rather a contradiction in terms. I’m well aware of the episode you reference. When I said that the fictional universe of Star Trek is politically correct, I meant, of course, the scriptwriters, acting either on their own volition or under the direction of the producers or of mutual accord. This episode is very evidential of that consideration.
An android can be programmed to know what existence is and that it exists, of course, and to defend that existence. If you want to call that “self-awareness,” so be it. But that is not sentience or consciousness regardless of what the PC mavens of Star Trek contend. BTW, I define sentient as do dictionaries: “Able to perceive or feel things.” (I suppose now we can debate what “perceive” means.) In your estimation, are holodeck characters, like the doctor in Voyager, also sentient?
I’ll respond to your more substantive first reply as time permits. Thank you.
As I said, sure if you want to understand the concept of sentience as “has feelings”. In that case, an ant has more sentience than Data. Think about that.
Tell me, what do you think a feeing is? You better have a clear and articulate understanding of what a feeling is, because you’re using feelings as the center defining feature for how you think about something as profound and complex as sentience.
Remember how I defined feelings? They are simply the motivating pressure within the organism that compel it one way or another. Because nature needed a way to motivate organisms like this in the absence of understanding. How would you get a robot to do what it needs to do to maintain its health and avoid harming itself? Assuming the robot could not be programmed with anything like understanding or knowledge?
That’s all feelings are. They’re not mysterious. They’re the same as color vision: just a form of immediate response to certain ranges of stimuli. It’s nothing special or mysterious. Certainly not something you should be using as a key concept of how you think about sentience.
But yeah, keep outsourcing your ideas to Merriam Webster, if you like that sort of thing.
Being tied to a stake and burned alive as a witch or heretic does not “compel” a human to anything save death, a not soon enough blessing in this case. Being grief stricken over the death of a loved one compels nothing either. Not all feelings have a purpose. Some just are.
“I don’t see any paradox in Zeno’s idea. I state openly that it makes absolutely no sense to posit (and this is something Kant also noticed) an absolute or ultimate beginning or end when it comes to either space or time. It was logically impossible for there to have ever been a “Beginning” in the sense of there having been literally nothing before that, and this works in both space and time, namely it is a logical contradiction to suppose an absolute Beginning, End, or Edge to reality in either a spatial or temporal sense. Even if “nothing” (no matter, no energy, etc.) exists somewhere it is still the case that this place in and for which “nothing” exists still, itself, exists. Even if we are only talking about a logical space, and a space in which it is possible for something to someday exist. But in any case, Zeno was wrong, and there is no paradox; it has always been the case that there was something, it has never been the case that there was not anything.”
You just agreed with me and the idealist philosopher Kant! Since there was no beginning, then what do you position always existed, timelessly and eternally? A hydrogen atom?
Also, you don’t seem to understand what Zeno’s paradoxes are if you see no paradox in them. Or if you have “solved” them in the context of material realism, please share the solution with all and take your rightful place in the pantheon of great philosophers!
We became obsessed with the notion that only material reality is real, and that all things, including consciousness, could be explained away by reducing it to materiality.
How this view become predominant I don’t know. It is by no means self evidence that representational knowledge is more certain than immediate experience. Honestly, I feel like immediate experience is quite a bit more self evident than any form of representational knowledge. We can always doubt what we know, but we can’t doubt that we experience/feel.
The West has always had an extroverted spirit, or at least it appears that way to me. It wasn’t until the 20th century that westerners really started to look into states of consciousness, and even then, looking into states of consciousness has never eclipsed looking into the “objective” world as our highest value.
We know for logical certainty that something has always been the case, something has always existed… “existence exists” is a timeless truism. I have no idea what this existence thing looked like before our Big Bang, but I can be quite sure it didn’t look like some god or disembodied “universal consciousness”.
Which paradox of Zeno are you referring to? You’ll have to state the paradox you’re talking about for me to refute it. I was referring to the arrow and the paradox of halving distance, which as I said isn’t really a paradox at all.
As for feelings, you define them as “an experience”? A lot of things can be called experiences that cannot be called feelings, so that doesn’t work as a definition. Yes Data doesn’t feel pain when his finger is burned, but he does register the damage if there is any. If no damage occurs from the flame then obviously he isn’t going to register any damage, and the point is moot.
Every feeling evolved and exists now because it served some purpose. Pain serves a purpose even if being burned alive doesn’t, or even if the feeling of pain doesn’t save you from being burned when you’re already restrained in place with ropes. Again, none of this refutes or really even touches on what I was saying.
Feelings are also representational. They represent a state of the organism to itself. If you get stabbed with a knife then the pain represents the damage the knife is doing to you.
You can’t deny a feeling because a feeling is the way that the organism represents its own state to itself with regard to non-understanding, to a case of immediacy and undeniability. Feelings are literally the form of organic response which is “immediate and undeniable”… again, natural selection logically selected organisms with this capacity over others that lacked it. Nothing mysterious here at all.
The idea that consciousness emerges from certain arrangements of certain materials is a common idea because it is the only rational way to understand consciousness. You’re free to believe silly mysticisms if you like, they’re certainly poetic, but since you can’t rationally explain or articulate them I know for certain that the reason why you believe such things has nothing to do with… rationality.
Also, westerners have been looking into consciousness since the pre-Socratics. So what you said on that issue isn’t really true.
“Which paradox of Zeno are you referring to? You’ll have to state the paradox you’re talking about for me to refute it. I was referring to the arrow and the paradox of halving distance, which as I said isn’t really a paradox at all. “
That one is fine as one example (though you are mixing two different paradoxes together; the arrow and the dichotomy–no matter, as an arrow will do as well as Homer regarding the point you wish to illustrate). Why is it not a paradox in the context of material realism? You’ve solved it? If so and you’ve already stated the solution, then I must have missed it. Can you please tell me again.
The “paradox” assumes that either infinite regress of distance is the case, or that infinite regress of distance is not the case. As I already stated I side with infinite regress.
In this case, it says that with infinite regress you can’t cross a distance X without crossing an infinite number of sub-distances, so therefore since its supposedly impossible to cross infinity it should be impossible for any movement to take place.
The problem here is that when you look at regress you see that at a certain point things vanish beyond a horizon of approachability, namely the matter that makes up the arrow is constituted in a certain range of size and size is relative, and if you take one scope of reality in a given size-range and then try to compare it to increasingly smaller ranges eventually you’re going to reach a point where the range you started with isn’t able to even register the increasingly smaller ranges, because again this is relative. I cannot relate an atom to myself but that doesn’t mean I can’t step over atoms. There comes a point where physically if you keep reducing it becomes impossible for the given range that you are to register those differences, we call that point a Planck length. We can’t “see” into a Planck length because the means we have of seeing require us to use the sort of matter that we and our instruments are made out of, therefore after a certain point those instruments simply fail to register the differences and assert an “absolute threshold”-- but again this threshold is just relative to the scope of reality of that which is trying to measure.
Zeno assumes that an arrow should partake of the infinitude of endless regressions. What he fails to see is that while infinite regression is the case, logically speaking, it is not the case that the arrow can participate in that. The arrow is bound to its own relative frame of scope of distance and size, namely the arrow implicitly defines a standard for itself within which it is able to register differences and outside of which it is unable to register differences. So the arrow slides across the Planck lengths as if they were absolute thresholds when in reality the Planck length is merely the logical limit for what makes an arrow to relate physically to something else, again because the arrow and that out of which it is made is not itself “infinite” but exists in and as a relative scope of distance and size.
All things do this, they set the standards by which they are able to encounter and interpret other things. Move too far away from that standard and everything just looks the same.
I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you once again. I have found honesty in such matters is always prudent as opposed to trying to bluff one’s way through. After reading your purported solution to one of Zeno’s paradoxes intently several times, I must confess I cannot understand it. It might be gobbledygook or it might be brilliant and therefore over my head in accordance with my limited comprehension of physics, though I am familiar with the Planck length, at least. My suggestion to you is to send it to a physicist for possible comment. Most if not all physicists who write books on the subject intended for the intelligent layman have contact email addresses available online at their academic institutions. I have found that most will answer polite and coherent inquirers.
I might suggest in particular Dr. Julian Barbour whom I quote within my philosophical proof of a creator posted on this forum. He has a paradigm of reality which is essentially a variation on the standard Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. He is the author of The End of Time. Although he holds a doctorate in physics, he prefers not to be associated with an academic institution, unusual for a physicist of his renown. I believe he primarily makes his living as a foreign language translator in addition to his book sales. I have found him to be the consummate British gentleman, so I would suggest no profanity. If interested, here is his website’s URL with a contact email address:
By the way, I edited my post which you quoted after you did so. You confused two of Zeno’s paradoxes, though your point is still valid. The paradox that you are addressing is called the Dichotomy paradox in which Zeno used Homer walking (not an arrow in flight) as an example. The arrow paradox points to a different (but related) proposition. I would suggest you make the change before submitting it to Dr. Barbour or another physicist. As I said, it makes no difference to your point but it might prejudice them against you as making such an elementary error could cause them to doubt your knowledge on such matters and therefore the worthwhileness of their time.
There would either be local or universal consciousness.
It would seem a feat for each Planck lengths worth of matter to be endowed with consciousness that can relate to the level of awareness of a human, let alone to a presumed god.
The word consciousness is inadequate, but it always has been.
Within a digital world, any piece of working code is sentient.
Purposes are functions of chance, they are relatively consistent vectors that come about around relatively dense vortexes of chance.
Each particle self-values, but that doesn’t make it conscious. It makes it responsive, but not necessarily sentient.
That would very much undermine the notion of sentience, as it implies an apparent relative freedom of motion. Atoms, whereas self-valuing, do not possess any liberties. They are fated to keep falling into a predestined placed, or to disintegrate with cataclysmic force. A sentient being would have options therein between.
Implication: all local consciousness, sentience, responsiveness, is tied into greater systems not directly but through near infinite refraction of its values - every step up the scale of significance is paid for with a near-direct contradiction of the previous scales values/orientation/consistency. This truth was adopted by secret orders, where each ranks ethics is in contradiction to the previous.
We arrived again at the 19th century definition of what newchristians/newagers mean when they say the word “consciousness”: the absence of consequence, logic and reason; metaphorically expressed in the dissolution of karma - the will to nothingness.
Before, this will was simply “the good” - now it is “consciousness” - but in no world did it ever adorn a true being. Such beliefs are the garments of corpses.
Buddha, what pale death you have made out of minds. Your teachings, for all the wisdom that fed them, are foolish at best. If only because one can never teach through words the virtues of that which lies beyond.
You should have kept silent, and made for an example, so that some at least might have understood, and fewer would have misunderstood.
You’re assuming things about my beliefs that I never stated. I don’t hold that consciousness is prior to materiality. I am only saying that it’s not self evident why we presume materiality to be something prior to consciousness.
And of course westerners have looked into consciousness. They just haven’t put as much emphasis on it as the east.