Debate coach here. Often engage in philosophical resolutions. First part of any debate case is definitions. If you don't have them it's impossible to argue properly.

My friend, self awareness comes before consciousness I assure you.

> timeless, thoughtless void

I would argue that time is absolutely essential to anything we call experience and consciousness—these only take place in time. Dreamless sleep is neither experience nor consciousness, but really the absence thereof. We don’t really know what it’s like to be in this “inanimate” state because we always reconstruct it after the fact through metaphors and negations (timeless, thoughtless, dreamless).

In other words, I don’t think this is evidence for panpsychism but rather demonstrates that humans consciousness shuts down completely at times. So saying that it is akin to the consciousness of, say, a stone would be to say that a stone doesn’t have consciousness at all.

Except you can be both happy all the time, and not be hedonistic at all, because hedonism is not a requirement of happiness. One can be happy with their state in the world, without making any attempt to change it. Hedonism, on the other hand, requires the pursuit of a specific set of ends.

> His goals are for max profit that is all.

That's false and if you read his twitter posts occasionally, you'd see why. Musk regularly puts ego/pride above profits. He wouldn't be losing as much if he wasn't regularly banning or insulting people who disagree with him on twitter or call him out, and he's regularly trying to paint himself as being some sort of saviour.

If his goals were really just for maximizing profits, he'd keep his mouth shut and play in the background.

I’m sorry, but if you think you’re going to persuade me that I’m wrong with this pseudo-intellectual jargon - you need to rethink your approach. All you’ve said is consciousness cannot occur without complex neuronal activity but not vice versa which I did not imply to be false anyway. The rest of your speech was some weird trip you and a thesaurus had together.

Either that or you used an AI to write your comment which I suspect since you said, “but we have some broad hints and directions to follow”, unless you make a leading statement to that odd sentence - it is just such a non-sequitur thing to say.

I wish more people were aware of how impossible it is to discuss philosophy without first agreeing upon the definitions of the terms you’re using. Philosophy of consciousness is one of my favorite niches to read about, but sooo many well educated thinkers on the subject neglect to parameterize what they mean by consciousness and end up going in circles defending their preconceived notions of the word instead of engaging with it in the way the speaker intended. Nothing more frustrating to me than two intelligent thinkers debating completely different topics using the same word.

That was my reaction to. A higher ideal is extremely subjective, and striving towards some lofty or extremely difficult to achieve outcome isn't some sort of guaranteed path towards finding meaning. You decide what has meaning

….isn’t this what religion does?

"Complex neuronal activity" is not an explanation, it's basically a restatement of what generates consciousness in us, i.e. you can have complex neuronal activity without consciousness, but not vice versa, unless you do equivalent computations in some other substrate. The specific computations you have to do are unknown to us, but we have some broad hints and directions to look.

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Philosophy aims at truth. But the great philosophers didn't "get almost everything wrong," such that they're mere historical curiosities and unworthy of consideration otherwise.

Huemer says this based on a parody-level analysis of literally three ideas from three philosophers, but it's not right even if we just consider those examples. Kantian constructivism, for example, is still extremely influential in contemporary moral philosophy. Hume's skepticism, while often seen as mainly setting the stage for Kant, is hardly a dead idea that's fallen by the wayside; his problem of induction is still debated, for example.

I forget which greek philosopher it was specifically, but their conception of Happiness was closer to that. The greek word “Eudonia” has been loosely translated to mean “happiness,” however it more closely translates to “fulfillment,” “contentment,” etc. So often when some of those greek philosophers were discussing Happiness, they really meant fulfillment, which is very different from what we understand happiness to mean.

I like your point of need for preservation, react to stimuli and others as necessary but I'll posit that we can already do that with computers. Need for preservation is an interesting phrase, because I can create an evolutionary algorithm that rewards preservation. But 'need' implies desire. And we have no idea how to make a computer program desire anything. React to outside stimuli - this can be emulated on a computer, but there is nothing with any sense of 'outside' and 'inside'. Others as necessary - see previous for problem with 'others'. Necessary is also problematic, because it implies desire or need?

If you can teach me how to make a computer program feel pain and pleasure, then I agree you can create ai that is sentient. If you can't, then no mater how interesting, complex, seemingly intelligent the code behaves, I don't see how you can consider it conscious.

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When talking about Frankl, the author says this:

Some prisoners regressed into a more animalistic state — losing touch with their humanity and becoming brutal survivalists. This is an understandable and perhaps the expected reaction to such an extreme situation.

I don't think the author would be critical of you for using pleasure to take the edge off incredible pain. I think what he is insinuating is that the harder the trial, sometimes, the harder it is to find higher meaning. Since I don't know you, I can't speak to your motivations, but I would assume that if you're willing to write about your pain on reddit, some part of your higher purpose involves sharing your experiences.

It absolutely is. I tell everyone I meet that I'm interested in pursuits that lead to good feelings and that I do very little in the ways of pushing my body to extremes of discomfort (except maybe in a sexual capacity, where I'll eventually be rewarded with euphoria/bliss in the right environment) since I'm already constantly in a state of extreme discomfort (especially since the US refuses to administer opiates to chronic pain patients now, fuck all of the abuse surrounding the only drug that actually makes a dent in my pain).

Able bodied people look at me like I'm crazy because they simply do not understand how traumatic an experience like mine is. People don't want to look at their own privilege critically, just like the author. And it seems like a case of a severe lack of empathy, but that's nothing unusual for today's accepted discourse.

It may not be the case that there is a strong correlation between consciousness and evidence of consciousness. Your claim that it is obvious which other entities are conscious and which are not is a huge assumption, one that could be wrong.

"Consciousness and complex behaviour have no relationship whatsoever" *

* citation needed

Mario Bunge (1919-2020), argentine-canadian physics and philosopher, was a very important XX century science philosophy specialist, similar in quality and importance of ideas to Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos and Richard Dawid. He wrote that nonsense ideas are not able to be investigated; so that, it is impossible to declare them as false (try to imagine the time you need to fly from one place to another one using Heidegger´s definition of time as "maturation of temporality").

Bunge refuses to apply scientific methods in case of moral lack and describes four distinctive authentis science features: mutability, compatibility with previous general knowledge, partial intersection with another science (at least one of them) and scientific community supervision. Science is an always mutable knowledge.

He never accepted strings theory: according to him, the consistence, sophistication and beauty are never enough in science research. String theory is suspicious of pseudosciencia. It seems to be science fiction or at least failed science. (Bunge dixit)

Bunge explains that if we´d like to explore the mind as an immaterial entity and our goal is to understand mental processes, so the shortest way is free speculation. As a consequence, the idealistic conjectures so described will be no adequate to be confirmed by cerebral research. But, in case you understand that mental activity is cerebral activity, the scientific method is inevitable. This is the basis for cognitive neuroscience. So, there is always a more or less tacit philosophy on the basis of any research.

According to his definition of science, Bunge wrote that psychoanalysis was the most important XX century scientific fraud.

[Couldn't any computer which monitors its own state be reasonably described as self-aware? ] No this is just if/then algorithms to use the phrase loosely. But yes I would agree being self aware requires sentience as we understand it.

People have said that for decades, but I think it's been pretty thoroughly refuted. Here are some good links:

Consciousness is irrelevant to Quantum Mechanics

While in the future we may discover quantum effects that bear distinctively on conscious cognition ‘as such,’ we do not have such evidence today.

The major difference is lack of internal continuity. ChatGPT has no feedback process: it can't form new memories and therefore can't learn. I would argue that if that can be implemented, it would be at a human-like consciousness.

Surely you wouldn't be truly happy unless you ahd a meaningful life

I know I wouldn't be happy if I didn't have meaning to my life

I think that's a recipe for familiar versions of consciousness. With Pansychism, what consciousness feels like can vary radically. Concepts of emotion or even temporal continuity are traits of only relatively large and specialized consciousness. I like to point out that even as a human you experience a wide array of levels and version of consciousness. When waking up or black out drunk for example.