Questions of whether a given person's chosen meaning is wrong or if it can be objectively judged are independent of whether it is meaning.

As someone who has suffered greatly physically, your higher aim could be seeking hedonistic pleasure to offset your pain. Hedonistic pleasure is a tool for your higher aim, which is to overcome the unfortunate hand you were dealt.

You can adapt them ; or are you telling me they measured animals' intelligence by making them answer an IQ test?

It's why I think pansychism is right. There's no clear delineation for when a subjective experience emerged and I definitely am conscious, therefore so is everything else. I think the part everyone gets hung up on is human-like conscious, the scope of experience for inanimate objects is smaller to the point of being nigh unrecognizable to a conscious human. But you do know what its like to be inanimate: the timeless, thoughtless void of undreaming sleep or death. We experience a wide variety of forms of consciousness with drugs, sleep deprivation, etc. and thats likely a small sliver of possible forms.

One of the worst articles I've seen in the sub. Even the end, with the greatness definition, is so basic yet they seem to believe they've found a revolutionary idea.

Written like a stubborn 15 yo, with an evident lack of understanding of the concepts and yet judging them as an all-knowing being.

Don't waste your time reading this, I kinda wish I had my 10 minutes back.

Sorry, I'm not sure I understand the question. I agree with the second part, though. It has a lot of attributes that make it difficult to describe, and it's something we give great importance to.

Edit: to try to address the question, I think human behavior is the best evidence. We demonstrate awareness through our actions. There are other terms we can use to describe these traits, though.

Was this written by Jordan Peterson or something ? How is happiness not meaningful ? Don't we pursue meaning because it makes us happier ? Why the fetishisation of suffering ?

Even hedonism is not meaningless. It recognizes that pleasure is sometimes attained through some suffering via making efforts to achieve goals for example. Hedonism isn't even meaningless or a bad philosophy.

I suspect that the Peterson-like people aren't actually pursuing meaning itself, they're pursuing a grandiose idea of themselves (or more plainly, status), that's why they express so much contempt. Same thing could be said about Nietzsche.

But Nietzsche and Peterson, I suspect, were and are deep down miserable, unhappy, lonely people

I don’t think the results are bad. I think good results are necessary but not sufficient for a meaningful project.

I’m talking about access to political power. I think Musk’s project is inherently illegitimate if it inherits the human rights abuses and disenfranchisement from an extremely hierarchical system. That’s not to say that all hierarchy necessarily creates human rights abuses. The key words are “deeply” and “extreme.”

Well then what evidence is there which can not be adequately explained without consciousness?

Also just to make it clearer, I do not claim it to BE mythical. Just that it is easy to seem mythical.

In my painful life experience, narcissists are rarely ever happy, and seem fairly sociopathic

I think it depends on what you think the role of philosophy is.

If you think it aims at finding truth, then the article makes a good point. You don't really study Becher and phlogiston theory in chemistry or Lamarck's view of evolution in biology, except as historical curiosities. If philosophy, like the hard sciences, aims at truth, then most of the old "great" philosophers shouldn't really be taught anymore, because they got almost everything wrong.

Now, if you think philosophy is more about learning how to think consistently about a variety of ultimately subjective topics, then of course the "great" philosophers are worth studying for the reasons you outlined, much as older literature is worth studying because it is the beginning of a very long and ongoing cultural conversation.

The issue, I think, is that most of the ancient philosophers, especially back before the hard sciences split off from natural philosophy, explicitly claim philosophy is the first type of thing rather than the second. And even today you'll get some philosophers who'll prattle nonsense about objective moral facts and whatnot. Philosophy is sort of an odd humanity in that way.

Couldn't any computer which monitors its own state be reasonably described as self-aware? I feel like a more precise definition would incorporate something like sentience.

"This Epicurean ideal of maximal pleasure/minimal pain has become thedefault ideal of the good life in our modern world. But the hedonistideal is not the only game in town, and in antiquity, it wasn’t even themain game."

Has this guy even _read_ any Epicurus?

Epicurus was NOT a pleasure maximizer. Ataraxia is NOT a state of constant, maximal pleasure. It is a state more akin to tranquility, to be achieved by moderating the appetites and practicing something not very different from Stoic virtue.

Epicurus would be absolutely horrified by what counts as "happiness" in modern popular culture. Unlimited consumerism with no restraint. Wasteful capitalism and unrbidled hedonistic sex was not his idea of a good time. He wanted to stay in his garden, cook simple foods, maintain intimate friendships, and practice the love of wisdom.

People get Epicurus wrong nearly 100% of the time.

This is literally what Jordan Peterson teaches.

I should probably delete it for not being respectful as per sub rules, even idiots are welcome to discuss here.

A constant state of ‘happy’ has a range of zero. One feeling, all the time. Imagine one meal all the time. The mind-numbing soul destroying temperature of sameness. A meaningful life has range. Highs and lows, giving us comparative power, ability to measure, creating data for analysis. Range of feeling and emotion is more interesting and valuable. And paradoxically, I’m happy most of the time because I seek daily life beyond sameness. I indulge risk that creates struggle with uncertain outcomes. Sometimes I’m freaked out, others elated, some morbidly depressed. I love my capacity to feel and live intensely. That makes me happy. Pop culture ref: Repo Man (1984) Harry Dean Stanton as Bud “the life of a repo man is always intense”.

The roboticist Pentti Haikonen has put forth the idea that natural (and by extension) artificial consciousness hinges on qualia, and that we won't develop said artificial consciousness until we can implement qualia-centric hardware of sufficient complexity. Considering that human wetware functions on a similar premise, i.e. that our conscious existence depends on inter-neural communication that is independent of objectivity, would you think this theory holds water?

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> I have experience in programming neural networks

Me too!

> just maybe, the complex brain activity conjures a subjective experience

That would be lovely. Conway's Game of Life, "simple rules, give rise to complexity" and all that. I don't think there's enough flexibility in current hardware that executes GNNs to allow this though. The kind of deviation required would be seen as various kinds of errors or problems with the model.

> I think a submarine would win the olympics for swimming

This is something a language model would come up with as it makes about as much sense as inquiring about the marital status of the number 5.

> I also think you are naive to consider your consciousness anything more than a language model with some inbuilt sensory features.

I think you should meditate more, perhaps try some LSD. What Is It Like to Be a Bat anyway?

edit BTW: I hope I don't come off as arguing. I'd love to have a cup of coffee and a chat with you.

Regardless as I agree that meaning is subjectively applied and made, I’m not going to lie to myself and think Elon is some Renaissance Man out to uplift the species.

The Great Man hypothesis has been bankrupt for a long time, and he’s just a mediocre computer programmer that is good at hyping investors with a start from daddy’s money. If he wants to be altruistic, he can start with better compensation for his employees.

Good point. And adding in the ambiguity of constantly changing tech, it won't get any simpler.

It's been one of the Big Questions for well over 3,000 years... Not sure we crack it soon

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>I don’t share the assumption that the feudal lord’s investment into the hoe project can be plausibly interpreted as some kind of charitable sacrifice.

Whether the feudal lord's investment was altruistic or selfish, the outcome is still a better hoe. That better hoe results in higher crop yields compared to work done. That's good. If those higher crop yields go entirely towards banquets for the lord, then the "good" is very limited compared to if it was distributed to the peasants. But it's very hard to see how those higher yields, on their own, could be "bad".