So it’s like, boom, we’re here, inside a mesh of circuits. That much I get. But then it’s like…Why the frug am I not your circuits?
Why am I only my circuits. Solipism.
And then it’s like, what if solipsim isn’t real. What if there are 3 people on this Earth who are sentient. Well why am I this particular one in this breadboard?
Like, what would happen if we plugged our neurons into a usb port into a computer? Would our consciousness go inside the computer? Would we be able to taste the circuit board? IF we plugged in a camera, would the two visions overlap, like double vision? It’s like. Boom. Suddenly I am instantly feeling strange new feelings.
When we die, what happens to our breadboards? Do we just magically enter other breadboards? Seems like an issue of size. Our consciousness expands until an image forms. We dont see things at the atomic level, because thats homogenous. Speaking of homogenous, as there ever been a homo genius?
Now my disclaimer, is our consciousness should not be fully inside of the computer. Why is consciousness so delicate? Why is it so important? Why are we so fragile? If we put ourselves into a computer, what if we cant we get ourselves out? Who made our selves? And why so fragile? Seems like a party trick parlor gag. Got the feeeling we ain’t even fragile, that it’s all a game…
There was a brilliant gay man names Alan Turing. It’s ironic that you even suggest this because he is the one responsible for theorizing the computer that you are in front of as you type. You might also know of him as the genius who thought of the Turing machine. He’s one of the 50 greatest thinkers of all time in my book. He has his pride of place within the great ideas of philosophy without a doubt. Oscar Wild was a genius too, not in a systematic way, but if you define genius it has a level of creativity to it. It’s no just about an IQ score. There are many geniuses that are gay. I’m sure you know of many gay geniuses, maybe you just didn’t know they were.
Our selves are open circuits. I don’t really take in the idea o solipsism, because I can see “out there”, I believe. If I had to recommend one book, that is experimental philosophy, for this idea it would have to be Thomas Reid’s An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense. Also, because we are an open system we can make inferences of patterns made by other people. We can’t read minds directly but we can talk to them, we can see their body language. That’s the best we can do, but it’s pretty damn good.
As for what happens after we die, I have no clue. I wish I did, but I don’t. I don’t know how we have consciousness at all. Evolutionary speaking, it would be much simpler if we were machines doing this or that unconsciously. Why do we spend so much time on Beauty and morality? These might not speak to evolution, they may work against it.
As for why consciousness is so delicate, I have schizophrenia and bipolar, so I know this problem intimately. In fact, just drinking caffeine has an impact. Maybe because it is so complex. The more complex a system gets the more problems eventually occur. Why do you think it is so delicate?
All the best,
Stephen