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Comment by mannykannot | Hacker News Reader

Please explain its relevance.

Definitions matter. The guy updated his, to exclude your sprinkler example.

It seems, from the other thread, that there was no change in an original definition, but it would be moot anyway, as the sprinkler example follows the reasoning of your claim that a crab is self-conscious, which in turn follows from the confusion, over the difference between being a thing and knowing that one is that thing, in this paragraph:

"Know you are that thing - every thing is itself, if it has well defined boundaries. Knowing something is just having access to that information and good reasons to believe it to be correct. Here we have a tautology - that a thing is itself - so it doesn't require much to know that. What you are probably more interested in is a mechanism that can take advantge of that knowledge in various ways. Like self preservation."

This line of thought leads to the self-consciousness of buildings in exactly the same way as it leads to the self-consciousness of crabs.

Well I was tacitly pointing out the inadequacy of that definition for the term, while running with it.

Anyway my original point stands :)

But you did not point out the inadequacy of the definition of the term, tacitly or otherwise; instead, you demonstrated the flaws in your own distortions of that definition. Consequently, it seems unlikely that there is a validation of your original point (whatever that was) somewhere in there.

I clearly disagree.

The clarity of your disagreement has not extended as far as a response to the counter-argument that is implicit in my original post in this thread. The final step in your argument that jjaredsimpson's definition of self-consciousness leads to the conclusion that crabs are self-conscious is this:

'Crabs are self conscious too because they act with a purpose of self preservation, which requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them.'

I pointed out that this works equally well for the claim that buildings with sprinkler systems are self-conscious, a conclusion that you have tacitly agreed is ridiculous. There's no difficulty in seeing what flaw in reasoning led to this conclusion: it is in the claim '[self preservation] requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them', where, in fact, all it needs is a suitable response to a stimulus that may signal an existential threat. This claim is not in jjaredsimpson's definition of self-consciousness; it is an independent axiom that you inserted into the discussion.

If your original point is that any discussion can be stalled by the injection of bogus arguments over the definitions of words, then I would have to agree that you have proven it by example.

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