this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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You have to define consciousness before you can prove it. I might argue that our definition of consciousness is fuzzy. But not so fuzzy that "a human is conscious and a rock is not" is up for serious debate.
You're describing Philosophical Zombies. And the broad answer to the question of "How do I know I'm not just talking to a zombie?" boils down to "You have to treat others as you would expect to be treated and give them the benefit of the doubt."
Mere ignorance is not evidence of a thing. And when you have an abundance of evidence to the contrary (these other individuals who behave and interact with me as I do, thus signaling all the indications of the consciousness I know I possess) defaulting to the negative assertion because you don't feel convinced isn't skeptical inquiry, its cynical denialism.
The catch with AI is that we have ample evidence to refute the claims of consciousness. So a teletype machine that replicates human interactions can be refuted as "conscious" on the grounds that its a big box full of wires and digital instructions which you know in advance was designed to create the illusion of humanity.
My point was more "if we cant even prove that each other are sentient, how can we possibly prove that a computer cant be?".
If you can't find ample evidence of human sentience then you either aren't looking or are deliberately misreading the definition of the term.
If you can't find ample evidence that computers aren't sentient, same goes.
You can definitely put blinders on and set yourself up to be fooled, one way or another. But there's a huge difference between "unassailable proof" and "ample convincing data".