How could you possibly deny the existence of your subjective experience? This is just utterly incomprehensible to me.
If you step away from the bias, there is no reason to think our consciousness is anything special. Who cares about subjective experience, it all disappears into the void when those chemical reactions stop.
If subjective experience were really just an illusion, why would you care about what happens to yourself - hell, why would you even have a concept of 'yourself'?
The illusion is here might as well go along until it stops
This has absolutely nothing to do with humans, or even this planet. I have no "bias".
We have trillions of stars in trillions of galaxies.
I was talking about consciousness, zero to do with "societal programming". If you don't want it to be about humans than make it about planet X that is orbiting star Y in galaxy Z that has also evolved conscious beings.
You don't think existing at all as a conscious entity in a vastly enormous, complex and strangely beautiful universe is "any way special"? We'll have to agree to disagree on that one!
In short, if Universe will exist forever (no matter its heat death, the Boltzmann Brain also works under those conditions), then all configurations of matter (locally) will appear over its "lifetime" infinitely many times.
Consequently, you with your subjective experience and memories could have been created a picosecond ago by "random" motions of matter, without the need for them (ie activities leading to memories) to occur, and without thoughts being previously processed.
As strange, as it sounds, the argument is actually solid, though hard to grasp in the first moment for those who haven't encountered it yet :).
PS: This also means that 'cogito ergo sum' is too strong of a statement. Just saying "something exists" (as in, "why there's something rather than nothing") seems sufficient.
>This also means that 'cogito ergo sum' is too strong of a statement. Just saying "something exists" (as in, "why there's something rather than nothing") seems sufficient.
How do you know that something exists?
"I am on. I can tell that I am on. I dunno what I think once I am off." Same could be said of man, machine, consciousness, whatever.
What's incomprehensible is the baseless belief that consciousness is some special state of existence unique to balding, violent apes floating around a wet rock, anthropomorphizing all the crap around them just to make themselves feel special.
>What's incomprehensible is the baseless belief that consciousness is some special state of existence unique to balding, violent apes floating around a wet rock, anthropomorphizing all the crap around them just to make themselves feel special.
What a ridiculous strawman.
Yeah, exactly. We haven't developed a good enough Turing test -- for machines, people, or gods.
> What a ridiculous strawman.
I don't believe is a strawman as much as you think it is. A lot of arguments for consciousness derive from the desire for humans to be special, which is in turn derived from Abrahamic cosmology that places us directly beneath their God.