this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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philosophy
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Other philosophy communities have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. [ x ]
"I thunk it so I dunk it." - Descartes
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Yes, I get what you're saying. Consciousness may result from these physical things, but its impossible to correlate conciousness to any of them because consciousness cannot be observed. We can speculate that consciousness arises from this or that set of processes, but we have no way of actually knowing that its the case because we can only see the processes and not the consciousness itself.
With pong we can see both the expression and cause behind it. We know specifically how these lines of code and electrical impulses impact the end result because we can see the end result. We can make changes in the code, or in the physical hardware and observe how that changes the display on the screen.
There is no way to observe that something else is having a conscious thought. We can speculate how the brain might create it, and we can modify the parameters of the things that we suspect create conscioisness, but we don't know when it flips on or off. By the very nature of consciousness itself we cannot. We can look at behaviors that we suspect correlate to consciousness. We can't know that they do. We can say " These brain functions result in this behavior" which is not at all the same as saying "We can observe the inner experience of this entity"
You're trying to prove that something has an inner experience by pointing to outer phenomena.
Yes there is no way to observe that something else has a conscious thought, but if we were to assume other highly complex possess similar means of consciousness as us, then we can look at outer phenomena to confirm it.
A philosophical zombie with my exact state but somehow no consciousness would be dead within the evening. They would have woken up this morning, completely failed to take any medication because they have no memory of medication (memory IS consciousness) no memory of glasses, no memory of what food is like in 2025... They would die. They would effectively be an infant.
To be agential in our universe is to be conscious. There is no distinction. The confusion comes when trying to separate agentiality from consciousness. A human has self diagnostic models, a mix of internal and external stimuli, and a whole host of chemical reactions that make up your consciousness. To say a P Zombie is not conscious is to say they would not receive an emotional improvement from my anti depressants in the morning. Emotion is consciousness.
The act of self modeling IS consciousness. There isn't anything else going on. It "feels" that way because "feeling" that way is *how" we self model. Consciousness isn't a thing its the sum total of all of your self modeling reified into a single experience to give you agency, which grants you an advantage in getting your fuck on.
Hell, I am not even sure a p zombie in my form could "wake up" in the morning. Waking up is an entirely conscious process...