mandlebro @mandlebro@qoto.org

@freemo @antares @fourmajor I feel all aspects of the mind can be plausibly explained by evolutionary pressures and biological and physical constraints, except for actual conscious experience. The thing I am experiencing right now as I write this, that I cannot share with anyone else, that I cannot even communicate about because it is uniquely mine and language requires commonality to form semantics. Some aspects of this thing can be understood by the aspects of the mind, but its existence and the innate nature of the primitive elements that constitute it are utterly beyond examination.

@freemo @antares @fourmajor I have read neuroscience papers where they talk about consciousness. In these papers, they are really implicitly assuming an identity between certain reported experiences and certain functions of the brain. These papers were focused on perception. Really, scientifically we can't talk about the "experiences" in and of themselves, but we can talk about the presence of the report which is evidence of some state of the system which we might call a "conscious" state by its ability to be reported. Additionally, these papers often used consciousness as a synonym for "awareness" which is why I talked about integrating information. In other words, neuroscience is the study of the relationship between the states of the brain and the behaviors of the agents in possession of the brain. We can say a subset of the information contained in the brain is information the agent is "aware" or "conscious" of by the agent's ability to report this information and to some degree their ability to otherwise act on it. This is the way I have seen "consciousness" used in some neuroscience papers.

@antares @freemo @fourmajor There are a lot of conflated ideas in this area that confuse people. The existence of consciousness, as in the incorrigible experiences of being, the qualia, the pure experience that make up ones existence, is something inaccessible to anything other than the being experiencing it and as thus the discussion of its existnece or nonexistence is pointless. What has a point is the question of whether something has personhood and thus should be treated as an agent with rights within our society. A side question is whether something is consious in the sense that neuroscientists talk about consiousness, which is really a discussion of a systems capacity to process information and integrate it into itself. The latter two topic deal with observable things while the first does not.

@cereal pretty triggering list in general ngl

@animeirl I'm surprised Czechnia is not higher as they have a right to bear arms.

@Eiregoat @pawlicker My understanding is that all intel processors have massive amounts of undocumented op codes, many of which produce crash and burn bugs

@Moon why is webp bad?

@hachre But consider that Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

@stux Bird poop is bad enough...

@ThereGoesBill@zirk.us @freemo Well I guess I was tricked lol

@ThereGoesBill@zirk.us @freemo Charles Dogson aka Lewis Carroll

@freemo Good words from the rare logician that's also wise.

@jeffcliff @nousnaut The way you construct numbers with no decimal expansion is, in fact, to define them in such a way that the decimal expansion would encode a Turing machine that solves the halting problem. If you define such a thing, you need to do a bunch of set theory to show that it actually exists, which is some really neat but super abstract math.