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hypericin

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All life has "drives". Viruses have "drives", to infect and reproduce. Roombas have "drives", to clean. This is not enough. What is relevant is whethe...
December 03, 2025 at 18:06
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December 03, 2025 at 17:52
The second two examples use "aware" in its other sense, which is simply to know a certain fact. To be aware of a mosquito bite, aware of a sunset, awa...
December 03, 2025 at 17:33
I would add, to @"Banno"'s question, that there is no first person without qualia. To be aware of anything at all, there must be something it is like ...
December 03, 2025 at 04:40
Probably not all that different. I think there really is a hard problem, and it is hard because of the relation between us and our own consciousness, ...
December 02, 2025 at 23:41
I have a somewhat different take. Consciousness is real, and in principle it admits to explanation. The problem is our unique epistemic relationship w...
December 02, 2025 at 23:23
Yes, that is exactly why we need the term, to specify we are talking about the first person aspect specifically. A very easy, simple recourse to incom...
December 02, 2025 at 23:00
A smell is a quale. You are free to be allergic to the word and never use it. And you are free to invent a world where qualia are just decor that don'...
December 02, 2025 at 22:54
I'm confident. There is more than a trivial distinction between meeting an old friend whose name you cannot place, and meeting a stranger. There are t...
December 02, 2025 at 22:37
Not recognizing something and forgetting the word for something are entirely different. You can know what a smell is, what produces it, while the name...
December 01, 2025 at 23:46
No, forgetting the word is a different case. I'm talking about the case where the smell is not recognized. "Sensation " is not good enough. It is almo...
December 01, 2025 at 23:03
This is demonstrably untrue. It doesn't allow for the common case where you smell something but cannot recall what it is. Despite not recalling, there...
December 01, 2025 at 21:10
Certainly. "Table look up" is at best a logical description of the operation, but not faithful to the actual mechanics. "Odor" is supposed to be the m...
December 01, 2025 at 00:00
Perhaps this suffices to describe what my brain does. I'm not generally aware, unless I'm struggling to identify an odor. That is a statement of what ...
November 30, 2025 at 23:12
For instance, I make use of qualia when I identify the smell of coffee. If I didn't recognize that particular subjective olfactory experience as coffe...
November 30, 2025 at 22:48
The quale can change, but memories must as well. This does not imply that qualia are irrelevant. What is required is the qualia are stable with respec...
November 30, 2025 at 22:18
Wait what? Drifting qualia is your idea, not mine. I'm pointing out how implausible it would be for memories and qualia to drift in lockstep without o...
November 30, 2025 at 21:59
As the brain receives a sensory signal, it is just a signal, presumably without any qualitative content. The brain has to do the work so that the sign...
November 30, 2025 at 21:56
Not a new position. The smells are symbols. Smells exhibit the characteristic one way relation of symbols. The smell points to the event, brewing coff...
November 30, 2025 at 21:38
Both. We coordinated on the basis of internal sensations. That is part of the mechanism. Lacking this, you might say "I smell coffee", I might say "I ...
November 30, 2025 at 03:02
If you claim you smell coffee, I cannot look inside your head to verify. But I can attend to my sense of smell: do I experience the internal sensation...
November 30, 2025 at 01:53
There is no hypostasisation. A quale is not a material thing, it is more an event. But it is concrete, not abstract. The "aroma of coffee" picks out t...
November 29, 2025 at 23:58
I think I agree with everything here. Maybe not a break with a reality. But certainly a break with objectivity is assessments of one's life circumstan...
November 29, 2025 at 10:15
I think what you have in mind is an incomplete absence of qualia. For instance, the idea of someone losing all five senses at once. Yet, they are blin...
November 28, 2025 at 19:52
Think division of responsibility. Different parts of the brain are responsible for different functions. When receiving information from the world, one...
November 28, 2025 at 16:33
FWIW, my take: We, as conscious beings, live in the perspective of the brain's executive decision maker. All qualia are informational, they tell us ab...
November 28, 2025 at 06:23
We don't know, and can never know, that the content of our qualia agree. What most of us do agree is that there is something that it is like to see an...
November 27, 2025 at 20:07
You may think the core feature of conscious experience is irrelevant. Others disagree. These don't generally refer to qualia. Rather, to public featur...
November 27, 2025 at 18:07
quote="Banno;1026883"]Folk are using “What-it-is-like” accounts, which misunderstand the source of first-person irreducibility. They treat it as arisi...
November 27, 2025 at 00:40
To me the natural conclusion is that the guff here about indexicals is irrelevant.
November 26, 2025 at 02:52
You say you will notice, but this already presumes that you have the capacity to notice. If the simulation is just state and processing, there will be...
November 25, 2025 at 19:07
I mean 'computational' in the broad scene, where one state of a weather system physically "computes" the next. The state and only the state is what is...
November 24, 2025 at 08:59
You are missing the point. It simulates the current. But there is no current, just numerical values representing current. That is what separates the s...
November 24, 2025 at 01:26
They can be, though. Elements aren't elemental, they can be further broken down into more basic particles. But discovering this more basic structure r...
November 23, 2025 at 22:04
You are missing the distinction. The sim simulates a physical chip, simulating it's physical properties. But, it exhibits none of the physical propert...
November 23, 2025 at 20:35
How could this be compatible with physicalism? There is nothing physical about the simulated person outside of the Turing machine. Simulations reprodu...
November 23, 2025 at 07:03
Great, nice compromise.
November 23, 2025 at 06:22
Please don't remove them, @"Jamal"! I like that there is a permanent repository for the stories on the web. I might lose my copies someday, then they ...
November 23, 2025 at 05:58
Euthanasia for the terminally Ill is one thing. For someone who is really depressed, or shaken by a loss that seems irrecoverable, that is quite anoth...
November 23, 2025 at 02:41
My argument was that suicide harms everyone that valued the suicidal, including the suicidal's own future selves. That suicide harms everyone who care...
November 22, 2025 at 20:38
First principle, in that these are concepts that are not simply compounds of other concepts. Diamond is a hard sparkly carbon substance, but substance...
November 22, 2025 at 17:53
Mainly different in it's language ability. Which allows it to think of a pink elephant, think about thinking about a pink elephant, and (sometimes) re...
November 10, 2025 at 22:33
I think your wording threw me a bit. What brings one pleasure is subjective. Opera may be considered pleasurable or unpleasurable. I think most will a...
November 10, 2025 at 16:06
Not necessarily. Opera is not itself pleasure, it is something that brings pleasure to you. If it is insufferable to me, it brings me no pleasure. The...
November 10, 2025 at 08:43
I think we can indeed report our thoughts and feelings, as opposed to self-analyze. But of course we don't have a sense that turns inward. We can repo...
November 10, 2025 at 05:57
I'm not sure how science could verifiably define such a thing. I take it to mean here, the ability to reliably report inner state. How can introspecti...
November 10, 2025 at 04:51
You could have read the paper in the time it took you to write all that! Though to be fair you do seem to write quickly. It really isn't the same cate...
November 10, 2025 at 03:09
The problem is, beyond the design of the llm "machinery" itself, they don't really know how it works either. LLM are in large respect black boxes, and...
November 09, 2025 at 23:34
But this is about it's ability to accurately introspect into it's own thought process (definitely check out the article I posted if you haven't yet). ...
November 09, 2025 at 22:58
Maybe. But some kind of reasoning process must be at work, whether or not it's the human like chain of reasoning they offer as explanation of their th...
November 09, 2025 at 22:38