[ExI] flawed humans

[William Flynn Wallace]

Let's try this one:  if you can react meaningfully with your environment,
such as fleeing a  fire, then you are conscious.  bill w

On Tue, Nov 29, 2022 at 8:13 PM Gadersd via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> It seems to me that you are putting the cart before the horse. Can you
> prove to us that you are conscious? Before asking if silicon life forms can
> be conscious, shouldn’t you first demonstrate that humans can be conscious?
> You may claim to be conscious, but chatbots and robots have also made that
> claim. You may claim to know innately that you are conscious, but I request
> something stronger than that. I don’t even claim to be conscious. I don’t
> know what it means to be conscious and there is no consensus on a
> definition. If you give a definition then I can at least determine if I am
> conscious by that definition. Consciousness might as well be on the gender
> spectrum, some believe in it and others don’t.
>
> On Nov 29, 2022, at 8:02 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>
> …
>
>
> >…I think we agree that humans are innately flawed in many ways.
>
> >…How about other animals?  Are any of them flawed?  In their niche they
> seem perfectly adapted unless the niche changes a lot.   bill w
>
> I suppose that depends on how you look at it Billw, but I would argue that
> all known life forms are flawed in that they are mortal.  Even if an
> organism is one that multiplies by dividing, such that one could argue it
> is in a sense an immortal being, it too is mortal: given enough time, that
> species will go extinct, even without external pressure.
>
> On the other hand, if we had some kind of silicon-based consciousness,
> then we could transfer ourselves over from an old substrate into a newer
> one, so our existence would continue in a way that one could claim to be
> the same as it was before the transfer.
>
> This all gets very murky and definition-dependent, so I don’t want to get
> all tangled up.  Rather I want to help you open your mind, ask questions
> you never asked, such as that really fundamental question: is consciousness
> substrate dependent?
>
> Well, all of it we know is on a carbon-based evolution-derived substrate,
> however… that in itself is insufficient evidence that other substrates
> cannot be the basis of consciousness.  I don’t see a good reason why it
> would be impossible for an alternative substrate to be the basis of
> consciousness.  Do you?
>
> spike
>
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