Consciousness and attendant concepts have been active research problems for thousands of years.
I can't think of one time in any thread on HN regarding these topics that someone offers a view that extends from all the work that has already been done.
Just de novo speculation and always really terrible takes.
The tech community appears totally unprepared to deal with these subjects.
When you have a meter stick that can measure consciousness, then you can ride around on your high horse dispensing empirical smack downs of armchair concepts.
And I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your take on the tech bros. They're often embarrassingly over confident in their takes too.
Start from where we are on these topics, which is definitely not nowhere.
I've read quite intensely (for a layman, alright) into philosophy of mind over the years and I've come to believe there's not much to be gained from engaging with it, vs. presenting your ideas in a self-contained manner or with reference to neuroscience or AI theory.
Calling two of the most powerful thought experiments in philosophy of mind and consciousness idiotic without details is less than empty, it's ridiculous.
My objection has nothing to do with "links". I am objecting to the method of acting as if there haven't been hundreds and hundreds of years of work on this subject. That's not an empty objection. It's pointing out that the method is wrong. Which is a substantive point. It doesn't have to be followed up with my own naive theory on the subject to be so.
Likewise Chinese Roomer must never reject the idea that human means nothing because human's composite parts a.k.a atoms do not think or talk or being 'conscious'.
But they can't reject. Because they must stand for the point that human is conscious. Simultaneously this bring to a contradictory.
It is mind boggling why folks think it is valid argument.
Also, what do you bring to the table? Anything you can add here?
[1] Lots of good articles here at SEP, although they can be a bit technical: https://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=consciou...
Presumably most people here are familiar with at least 1 serious intellectual subject. They are welcome to treat another with the same seriousness, and I presume as well they would know how, if they'd just bother to do so.
When you make these kind of complaints without offering any solutions, it comes across as if you only care about appearing intellectually superior, not being helpful.
If this were a group of willfully ignorant creationists, the simple act of pointing them to the existence of evolutionary studies wouldn't be so easily objected to.
In the book "Consciousness and the Brain" neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene writes that up until 1980s or 90s studying consciousness was basically out of scope for empirical science, since conscious seemed very difficult to define. So we have been seriously studying consciousness for only 30-something years.
Furthermore, there is no scientific consensus regarding how exactly consciousness works. For that reason the authors of the paper apply several different theories of consciousness.
Could you name any pre-20th century theory about consciousness that would be remotely relevant today?
In contrast, Spinoza's monism views mind and body as two aspects of a single substance. This has encouraged some modern theories to explore the inseparability of mental and physical phenomena, leading to holistic approaches to understanding Consciousness.
Hume's emphasis on experience and observation as the basis for knowledge has strongly shaped the empirical approach to studying emphasis on observation, experimentation, and empirical data in contemporary consciousness research.
I don't see how your description Hume's contribution extends beyond basic scientific method, developed by Francis Bacon, Galileo et al
It's not obvious to me that existing lines of inquiry are going to lead to a successful model of consciousness. In particular, my sense is that the AI revolution has provided us with more key insights than thousands of years of philosophical inquiry. But like you said, maybe I'm just ignorant of existing work. I'm happy to be proven wrong. Have you considered that not all readers might've been afforded the same educational opportunities as yourself?
People are engaging with openness and curiosity, exploring ideas. You're just telling them to shut up until they've read a bunch of existing work which might not even provide them a meaningful answer. I think trying to shut down any kind of conversation because someone hasn't spent hundreds or thousands of hours studying a field goes against the spirit of Hacker News.